by Greg Goodman
With over a decade and a half since the IPCC AR4, it is instructive to see how the “run away melting” of Arctic sea ice is progressing.
Mass media outlets have been paying little attention to Arctic sea ice in recent years apart from cries of alarm at carefully selected low points in the record. After much excitement and breathless claims of imminent “ice-free summers” in the Arctic starting around and inspired by the release of IPCC’s AR4 in 2007, we were told that Arctic sea ice was “the canary in the coal mine”, the harbinger of the catastrophic changes happening to the climate system and caused by human actions.
Fortunately for the purveyors of this point of view, 2007 experienced the lowest summer sea ice extent in the relatively short satellite record. Worse, after a few years of mild recovery, we witnessed the OMG minimum of 2012. Media spin went into over-drive with claims it was “worse than we thought”, and claims from activist-scientists that the Arctic was in a “death spiral”.[1]
Now with over a decade and a half since AR4 it would be instructive to see how the “run away melting” is progressing. To check in on our canary and see whether it has fallen from its perch and is lying in the saw-dust with its stiff little legs sadly pointing towards the heavens.
NSIDC maintains a very instructive and useful interactive graph [5], allowing display of any selected years from the satellite record on a day by day basis . They also publish the ice extent data for each day of the 45 year record in text format, as well as the date and magnitude of minimum ice extent each year.
Since the September minimum is the most volatile this became a favourite metric and was a regular media climate highlight each September. In 2007 Al Gore was famously saying (unnamed) scientists had told him there may be no more Arctic ice at all in summer by as early as 2013.
Climatologists frequently explain the idea of the “albedo feedback” whereby less ice leads to more solar energy entering the sea, causing warmer waters, more ice melting, more solar … and a “tipping point” being reached where irreversible, run-away melting would occur. This explanation, while plausible, is of a naive simplicity and does not even examine what other effects more open water may have and what other feedbacks, positive or negative, may come into play.
- More conductive heat loss since the ice was a good insulating barrier.
- More evaporative heat loss due to more open water exposed to persistently strong Arctic winds.
- More radiative heat loss, since water has a high emissivity in the infra-red and will be radiating more 24/7 throughout the summer and continuing into the winter when the Arctic is in permanent darkness and there is zero incident sunlight.
Even in the summer months, the little sunlight there is arrives at very low incident angles and a high proportion is reflected not absorbed at all. This weakens the supposed albedo feedback. It seems this has not been measured or quantified in place. It remains speculative but is somehow expected/assumed to be a dominant factor in the changing polar climate.
So what does the 45 years of daily satellite data tell us?
Figure 1. Arctic sea ice extent ( areas with less than 15% ice coverage ).
We can see that in 2007 and even up until 2012, the reduction in sea ice extent was indeed reducing significantly and at an accelerating rate. A quadratic function, corresponding to a constantly increasing rate of melting, did provide a reasonably good fit to the date from around 1995. This does not prove that AGW was the cause of that change but it did at least seem a reasonable hypothesis which merited proper investigation. Instead this was taken as a self-evident truth which did not require any proof.
Had that indeed been the case there would have been no summer ice by around 2023/24. However, as the subsequent record now tells us, this simplistic interpretation no longer fits the observed data and therefore is formally rebutted. Not to recognise this would be “science denial” or to display a “flat-earther” mentality. It may even constitute “climate change denial” !
With 16 years more data under our belts, we see a very different outcome. The 2023 sea ice minimum on 18/19 September was indistinguishable from that of 2007 when all the hysterical screaming began. ZERO net change in 17 years. The linear trend since 2007 is indistinguishable from zero ( around -0.17% per year ). Sadly, virtually no one seems to be aware of this GOOD NEWS because there is a stony silence from the media who steadfastly avoid mentioning it and climatologists who prefer to divert the discussion elsewhere : ice maximum, Antarctic sea ice, calving glaciers …. anything but canaries !!
At best we are told the lowest 17y on record are the last 17y, without also being told that period shows no net change.[2] Or we are told sea ice IS shrinking implying it is still happening. The grammatically a falsehood and at best wilful misdirection. eg. NASA Vital signs: “Key Takeaway: Summer Arctic sea ice extent is shrinking by 12.3% per decade due to warmer temperatures.”[3] Climate science seems to have moved from “Hide the decline” to “Hide the lack of decline” !
Regime change
Sumatra et al 2023 [4] Determines that there has been a regime change in the Artic since 2007 witnessed by the thickness and character of ice flow through the Fram Straight.
“Here we show that the Arctic sea ice regime shifted in 2007 from thicker and deformed to thinner and more uniform ice cover. Continuous sea ice monitoring in the Fram Strait over the last three decades revealed the shift.”
Figure 2.
Analysis of year-to-year variation in the date of the summer sea ice minimum also shows a distinct change around 2007 from a trend to later date of minimum ice from 1987-2007 to a trend to earlier minima from 2007-2017. This jumped to later dates close to 2007 timing in recent years. There is a strong biannual (circa 2y) component throughout the record. There may also be indications of the repetition of a 30y cycle here but the dataset is too short for a clear determination of such a pattern.
Figure 3.
Derivation of this result is shown here:https://climategrog.wordpress.com/arctic-min-dates/
With a more detailed discussion here:https://climategrog.wordpress.com/category/periodic-analysis/
Conclusion
The detailed daily satellite data of sea ice extent provides the basis for extended study to understand the variation and forces driving change. Sadly much of the discussion seems based on drawing a straight line through the entire dataset and reducing it to single scalar value: the “trend”, which is instantly, and spuriously, attributed to the monotonic rise in atmospheric CO2. This is lazy and convenient but not scientific. The rich granularity of 45y of daily data shows the variation is anything but monotonic and that other factors and feedbacks are at play.
More serious analysis is necessary to determine the extent that long term temperature rise is contributing to change, what feedbacks ( both positive and negative ) are at play and what this tells us about long term change. Trivial “trend” fitting is clearly grossly inadequate to understand the cryosphere and inform energy policy consequences and adaptation measures.
More honest reporting is required from media outlets, climate scientists and government bodies about the true nature of change, good news as well as bad, instead of highly selective reporting or misreporting to build an alarmist narrative.
References
[1] Climate Central : Arctic Death Spiral: More Bad News about Sea Ice
https://www.climatecentral.org/news/arctic-death-spiral-more-bad-news-about-sea-ice
“The Arctic is in a death spiral. How much longer will it exist?” https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2020/oct/13/arctic-ice-melting-climate-change-global-warming
“Unfortunately it has become too late to save Arctic summer sea ice,” said Prof Dirk Notz, of the University of Hamburg” https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/06/too-late-now-to-save-arctic-summer-ice-climate-scientists-find
[2] NSIDC: ” The last 17 years, from 2007 to 2023, are the lowest 17 sea ice extents in the satellite record.” https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2023/09/arctic-sea-ice-minimum-at-sixth/
[3] NASA Vital Signs: “Key Takeaway: Summer Arctic sea ice extent is shrinking by 12.3% per decade due to warmer temperatures.”
https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/arctic-sea-ice/
[4] Sumata, H., de Steur, L., Divine, D.V. et al. Regime shift in Arctic Ocean sea ice thickness. Nature 615, 443–449 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05686-x
[5] NSIDC Charctic interactive sea ice graph:
https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/
AMO and Arctic warming had been driven by negative NAO regimes 1995-1999 and 2005-2013. This is normal for a centennial solar minimum. Every other warm AMO phase is during a centennial solar minimum, which constrains the long term average AMO frequency to 55 years.
Rising CO2 forcing according to the consensus of circulation models should increase positive NAO conditions, which would in theory drive a colder AMO and Arctic.
https://archive.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch10s10-3-5-6.html
Since 2013, NAO conditions have been generally more positive, putting a lid on the warming trend. While increases in cloud cover over the Arctic Ocean have resulted in cooler mid summer temperatures 80-90N since around 2000. Which fully negates the proposed surface albedo positive feedback.
https://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
Hi Ulric, I don’t see 1995-1999 and 2005-2013 in the graphs shown here. The major part of the melting was 1997-2007.
Though I did the quadratic regression from 1991, that’s the cusp of the parabola and almost flat. With the exception of 2012, it was already recovering from 2007 and show zero trend from that date.
I did intend to include CPOM’s Cryosat2 ice volume by they can’t be arsed to keep their data down loads upto date. Here is last years data.
https://climategrog.files.wordpress.com/2022/07/cpom_arctic_ice_vol_mths_2022.png
The jump from Oct 2012 to Oct2013 was something crazy like +65% ice volume !! Another bit of good news the press forgot to relay to us after screaming about 2012.
You don’t see it in the graphs because I didn’t actually link the NAO data. I would argue that the recovery was from 2013, but splitting hairs over that distracts from the more important points that I have raised.
https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/pna/month.nao.png
Thanks , I meant I don’t see that timing in sea ice extent graphs.
I do wish the climate scientist would get beyond linear “trends” and running means, which distort the data , turn peaks into troughs and leave half the “noise” you intended to filter out.
https://climategrog.wordpress.com/2013/05/19/triple-running-mean-filters/
Greg.
“I meant I don’t see that timing in sea ice extent graphs.”
Probably because you’re only looking at the annual minimum.
The critical argument about the canary is that rising CO2 forcing is expected to increase positive NAO/AO conditions, which can only drive a colder AMO and Arctic.
https://archive.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch10s10-3-5-6.html
Here is a link to the full size version of Figure 1.
https://climategrog.files.wordpress.com/2023/10/arctic-minquad-zero.png
Judith, Thanks for writing this. I am probably among many who didn’t realize what had happened and how badly wrong the doom and gloomers were.
I’m glad you found it informative. Just check the first line to see who wrote it !
Most of the world is unaware of this because very few take the time to dig out the data and the media create a false impression of continued decline by only highlighting low record years and deliberately not telling you the next year it recover by 65% !
Or they agencies like NASA lie to you that ice “is” declining when it has been flat for 17y.
“… very few take the time to dig out the data…”
This can be said for almost any issue involving AGW. If someone wants to know all the facts, it doesn’t take much research to find them. I’ve done that hundreds of times after reading some claims in the media. Invariably, the story gets more complicated than just global warming, and if the story isn’t completely disproven, one can find many reasons to be skeptical.
The first stories I investigated involved communities faced with “runaway sea level rise”. Every single time the real culprit was subsidence. From there I went to stories about hurricanes, floods, heatwaves, tornadoes, doomsday glaciers, etc. When finished reading the actual science and some history, the claims in the story didn’t hold up.
In the last few days I’ve followed up on stories about salt water moving up the Mississippi River and the “greatest drought ever” in Brazil. It took all of 5 minutes to read about the Corps of Engineers dredging for a deeper channel in the Mississippi to accommodate shipping twice in the last 40 years. It took another 5 minutes to read the science about the Grande Seca of 1877-1978 in Brazil when 500,000 people died and the earliest recorded drought being in 1573, plus a history of other Brazilian droughts. (A plug for the wonders of Google. Growing up, the closest library was 9 miles away. It would have taken an entire morning to find the information, and in reality the library probably would not have had it.)
I don’t recall a single contemporary event or claim, in 13 years of research, that I considered unprecedented.
Given my experience of finding with great ease information and data which, at a minimum, create doubts about the stories and narratives of AGW, I can only conclude that the believers don’t want to know. Cognitive dissonance and all that messy stuff.
“… because very few take the time to dig out the data …”
That seems to be true about any issue involving AGW. It doesn’t take much of an effort to research the claims by the media. I’ve been doing that for over a decade and when I do, I find that there is much more complexity than the event just being the result of AGW.
Initially, each time I read about a community affected by sea level rise I investigated the specifics of that location. Invariably, significant subsidence was the cause. When I dug into stories about heatwaves, hurricanes, droughts, floods, etc, I found that there were many reasons to question the cause being global warming.
Just this week I read about seawater entering the Mississippi River beyond normal distances. It turns out that the Corps of Engineers had twice in the last 40 years dredged the River to new depths for shipping purposes. I also read about the current Brazil drought being the “worst in history”. What wasn’t mentioned was that the Grande Seca in 1877-88 cost 500,000 lives and the earliest significant drought in Brazil was recorded in 1743 and the region has a history of droughts. It didn’t take more than 5 minutes to find the information on both issues.
I can only conclude that people don’t want to know the facts. They are more comfortable believing what they want to believe. Cognitive dissonance and all that stuff.
Here is the thing though. The doom and gloomers are always wrong from this perspective. They exaggerate how bad a situation will be.
That doesn’t mean they are wrong though in totality.
Climate change is happening and it may end up catastrophic.
The argument that initial predictions were wrong may be true but it’s an extremely silly (unintelligent) way to view the situation.
I haven’t noticed any anthropogenic change that is remotely close to “catastrophic” or any reason to believe current rates of change will accelerate creating any significant obstacle to humanity.
Wei Zhang,
Very anthropocentric viewpoint. Have you noticed any ‘anthropogenic change that is remotely close to “catastrophic” or any reason to believe current rates of change will accelerate’ that will create significant obstacles for species other than humanity? If not, see:
“Accelerated modern human–induced species losses: Entering the sixth mass extinction,” Ceballos et al., ScienceAdvances 2015).
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1400253
Instead of using euphemisms like “canary in the coal mine”, we should use something like “species (extinctions) in the earth’s biosphere”.
Loss of species is a much more concerning problem than global warming. Each species is a unique genetic code that may contain the directions for life-saving drugs or recipes for materials or functions that we would treasure. Losing species is like burning the library of Alexandria. The E.O. Wilson Biophilia Center is dedicated to saving biodiversity.
However, I don’t put any faith in the numbers quoted here or elsewhere. We have absolutely no idea how many species exist. Hundreds of new ones are discovered (or defined) every year. Some estimates are that we know only 10% of the species on Earth. And do these estimates include the formation of new species? How many are produced each year, decade, century? Again, we have not the slightest idea.
Nevertheless, we should work very hard to preserve those that we can save. We don’t want to lose even one book from that library of life if we can help it since we don’t know which one may hold an important key to enhancing human existence.
Aaron | October 23, 2023 at 1:43 am | Reply
Aaron, climate change is indeed happening, just as it has happened every year for billions of years.
However, there’s no evidence that it is “catastrophic”. In fact, there’s no evidence of any “catastrophe”. Here’s the science.
w.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/04/25/wheres-the-emergency/
ganon1950 | October 25, 2023 at 11:35 am |
Sorry, Ganon, but the claims of a “Sixth Mass Extinction” are just as much garbage as Al Gore’s claims of the end of Arctic sea ice by 2013. See my peer reviewed article below.
w.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/25/new-paper-from-loehle-eschenbach-shows-extinction-data-has-been-wrongly-blamed-on-climate-change-due-to-island-species-sensitivity/
Willis Eschenbach,
Calling something “garbage” and comparing to an unrelated and made up paraphrase of Al Gore is not a scientific refutation. (in 2009 at Copenhagen Climate Conference, He said “Some of the models suggest that there is a 75 percent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during some of the summer months, could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years.”, 2007, Nobel acceptance “…One study estimated that it could be completely gone during summer in less than 22 years. Another new study, to be presented by U.S. Navy researchers later this week, warns it could happen in as little as 7 years.”) If you don’t know the difference between “will happen by” (yours) and “could happen in as little as” (Gore), then you are illiterate. If you do know the difference, you are being disingenuous. The math is also incorrect.
I’m not surprised that island species are more subject to extinction – it’s called limited habitat. Did your paper actually say anything about the RATE of extinctions with time? At best, your paper is pseudo-science deflection from the rate of extinction of species over time. He is a “real” paper that addresses the real subject:
The biodiversity of species and their rates of extinction, distribution, and protection, Pimm et al., Science (2014)
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1246752
ganon1950 | November 26, 2023 at 2:18 pm |
This is hilarious. I linked to my peer-reviewed paper on extinctions.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/230545957_Historical_bird_and_terrestrial_mammal_extinction_rates_and_causes
It’s entitled “Historical bird and terrestrial mammal extinction rates and causes”, and the abstract says:
The text, of course, explains the observations and the math behind those values.
The range for each value means that the current rate of extinctions with time is not statistically different from the “background rate” of extinctions with time from the fossil record.
TL;DR version? There’s no “6th Wave Of Extinctions” visible to date.
In response, ganon1950 replied:
Um … er …
w.
Willis,
“Sorry, Ganon, but the claims of a “Sixth Mass Extinction” are just as much garbage as Al Gore’s claims of the end of Arctic sea ice by 2013. See my peer reviewed article below.”
Hilarious, if that is your refutation to the two Science articles I quoted. It seems you agree with the “garbage”.
“The continental mammal extinction rate was between 0.89 and 7.4 times the background rate,whereas the island mammal extinction rate was between 82 and 702 times background. The continental bird extinction rate was between 0.69 and 5.9 times the background rate, whereas for islands it was between 98 and 844 times the background rate.”
It seems as though extinction rates are up significantly everywhere and that island species are the “canary in the coal mine”. Thanks for that.
I like to refer to Greenland Ice Core records.
When the Arctic is warmest, the ice accumulation on Greenland is the most and after multiple years of more ice accumulation, ice extent increases, ice pushes into the turbulent warm Gulf Stream ocean currents and chills the Arctic ocean to form sea ice during a colder period. During the colder periods, records show the frozen oceans do not provide enough evaporation and snowfall to maintain the ice. The land ice depletes until it retreats and the following warm cycle rebuilds the ice.
This is a natural, self correcting cycle with alternating warmer and colder time periods. The thermostat setting is the temperature sea ice freezes and thaws. Warm thawed ocean currents not covered with sea ice power the ice machine until more ice causes colder. Cold frozen ocean currents, covered with sea ice prevent evaporation and snowfall until ice is depleted and the warm gulf stream is allowed to take away the sea ice and the cycle repeats.
CO2, a trace gas, does not change the thermostat setting, the temperature sea ice freezes and thaws. The thermostat setting is fixed by basic properties of water, in all of its changing states. Water is abundant in all of its states, water on the surface and water vapor and water drops and ice crystals in the atmosphere. Storms of all sorts get energy from the sun and water evaporates putting the energy into water vapor and the rain and snow storms send IR out and send cooling water and ice down. Some cools immediately and some ice is stored for cooling by thawing and reflecting later.
Water and Ice are not even part of Climate Energy Balance Charts and therefore not properly considered in Climate Models.
Their forecasts do frequently fail and their Energy Balance leaves out some most important factors.
Ice on land thaws and ice sheets and glaciers flow and thin. The water flows downhill and mostly returns to the oceans, if it does not evaporate on the way. The ocean water can only become sequestered ice on land again if ocean water evaporates near enough to where it can form snow and fall on old ice to replenish the ice sheets and glaciers. Ice core records all indicate the replenishing of the ice sheets and glaciers happens much more in warmest times when sea ice and ice shelves are gone and the water closest to land can evaporate the most where snowfall can replenish the old ice.
This explains the alternating warmer and colder patterns in polar ice core records.
It snows more in warmer times until more ice causes colder.
It snows less in colder times until less ice allows warmer.
‘…other feedbacks, positive or negative, may come into play,’ e.g.,
• increased albedo due to increase in low cloud cover…
Indeed the Arctic Ice “death spiral” has been replaced by a “plateau” since 2007. Here are the Sept. Monthly extents from both MASIE and SII:
https://rclutz.files.wordpress.com/2023/10/arctic-sept.-ave-2023.png
The longer view, as noted in Goodman’s post, shows this pattern:
https://rclutz.files.wordpress.com/2023/01/sii-annual-to-2022.png
We are frequently told that only the March maximums and the September minimums matter, since the other months are only transitional between the two. So the graph above shows the mean ice extent, averaging the two months March and September.
The satellites involve rocket science, but this does not. There was a small loss of ice extent over the first 17 years, then a dramatic downturn for 11 years, 9 times the rate as before. That was followed by the current 15-year plateau with a slight gain comparable to the beginning loss. All the fuss is over that middle period, and we know what caused it. A lot of multi-year ice was flushed out through the Fram Strait, leaving behind more easily melted younger ice. The effects from that natural occurrence bottomed out in 2007.
Some complain it is too soon to say Arctic Ice is recovering, or that 2007 is a true change point. The same people were quick to jump on a declining period after 1996 as evidence of a “Death Spiral.”
I don’t see any indication of recovery but so what? That word itself implies there is something wrong with less ice, something to “recover” from, like being ill or running a fever.
Climate changes, who’da thought.
The key point is that the idea of a dominant positive feedback has been formally dismissed. Once the vase has reached the tipping point it can never slow down or pause.
Also the idea that we are seeing a change which is at least consistent with the idea it is being driven by AGW and CO2 is destroyed. We are clearly not seeing monotonic change.
The trick of reducing over 16000 individual daily measurements to a single scalar figure is designed to REMOVE all useful information from which a scientific analysis can be done and ensure a false “correlation” with rising CO2.
Every variable you can measure correlated with everything else if you reduce it all to a linear “trend”.
Greg.
Sensational scientific data! I’ve grown very tired of politicians acting like they know what they are talking about. Thank you for your insightful report!!!!
Many people, some are “So Called Climate Scientists” tell us that Arctic Sea Ice is the “Canary in the Coal Mine”. The Canary in the Coal Mine has to die to tell the people there is issues with the air they are breathing.
The Arctic Ocean Canary just sends the message, sea ice is low so more evaporation and snowfall is rebuilding the sequestered ice on Greenland and in many other places around the Arctic and this will continue until more ice is pushed into the turbulent salt water to form sea ice and turn the ice machines off.
Then Arctic Ocean Canary just sends the message, sea ice is high so less evaporation and snowfall is going to allow the sequestered ice on Greenland and in many other places around the Arctic to deplete and this will continue until less and less ice is pushed into the turbulent salt water to form sea ice and sea ice will thaw and turn the ice machines on.
This natural cycle has been successful for millions of years and will continue for all foreseeable time. A major warm time with massive snowfall, recorded in ice core records, caused major ice ages with long time to thaw the ice, like 100 thousand years of cold. A Medieval warm time with more snowfall, recorded in ice core records, caused the little ice age with a few hundred years to thaw the ice.
Climate is now in a new time that the upper and lower bounds of temperatures are closer than ever in history, according to our written history and data.
Do you want another major ice age with ice sheets covering much of the northern continents, do you want another major warm tie with sea levels 300 feet higher.
Do you want to know why those major ice cycles suddenly ceased and were replaced with much smaller cycles with much less range between max and min temperatures and sea levels, during the most recent ten thousand years? THIS DID HAPPEN! DO YOU CARE WHY?
“and will continue for all foreseeable time”?
Not sure whether you should say things like that.
I just think it would have to get really hot for Eastern Russia to become too warm for people. -40C in Kamkatchka.
I’m thinking of starting a new climate movement called Just Sod Off ( JSO ) where we can throw orange paint at any one we disagree with. Anyone want to join ?
;)
Nah, I prefer to throw real data and analyses at ones that make subjective, non-quantitative, and unsupported claims that exhibit a distinct bias.
The graph of total ice volume continues to decline. The minimum in extent , not volume, of 2012 was when all the thick multi-year ice was highly compacted. It used to stretch from svalbard to barrow. The multi year ice has since declined to almost nothing.
As a result, the Eastern and Western Northern passages are navigable. This is a boon for shipping.
The polar bears seem to be unbothered too.
We probably need to see substantially more warming before anything looks different up there.
I am curious about what would need to change for there to be recovery of multi year ice.
March max ice volume had drifted down a little since they started in 2011. The October figures ( nearest they get to September min ) has never been lower than the first two points 2011,2012.
There was a massive recovery in 2013 and gradual decline from that high. I do not see an obvious trend in the other months. Certainly nothing that would justify turning the world economy inside out for.
https://climategrog.files.wordpress.com/2022/07/cpom_arctic_ice_vol_mths_2022.png
Thanks, Greg. Nice piece.
Where are the references?
Wow, thanks, I hadn’t noticed. It looks like our host missed them off when copying the article. I’ll ask here to add them. Here’s my copy with refs.
https://climategrog.wordpress.com/2023/10/21/arctic-sea-ice-the-canary-in-the-coal-mine/
Thanks for pointing out this important omission.
What should interest us more would be changes that can result in an end to global warming, such as triggered by changes in Arctic insolation, and when it happens — as it has before and will again — there won’ be a damned thing we can do about it except prepare for global cooling and adapt.There’s good reason why insulation is considered one humanity’s greatest technological achievements.
It is obvious that the alarmists are upset about the lack of downwards trend in the Arctic data. It is why the dip in the Antarctic sea ice is now all the publicised concern. No doubt when it recovers, that scare will be memory holed and there will be a new panic problem – proving “we are all going to die” but on the way, can we have more research funding?
Yes, the would-be manipulators of opinion masquerading as journalists have developed a strategy of reporting extremes on one side of the data and studiously ignoring the other extreme, thus creating the illusion of dramatic change.
They do the same with temperatures, constantly scanning the globe for a town or city with a warm record and never reporting the cold records happening at the same time elsewhere.
As I pointed out here, government funded scientific bodies like NSIDC are playing this game and NASA are out and out lying by averaging the whole 45y to incorrectly say sea ice IS declining.
As we all know academia has been purged of objective scientists like Judith Curry so what is left in the “scientific ” literature is a collection of biased studies and a failure to report any contrary evidence.
Apparently ‘nothing much to worry about’ isn’t good click bait. The author needs to realise that the media are not prioritising truth telling, they are prioritising revenue generation/page views etc.
All journalists will tell ‘Establishment lies’ as a means to get a pay rise and promotion. ‘Establishment lies’ are ones which won’t see you sacked, demoted, disbarred or the like. Everyone who works in the media knows precisely what they can lie about and what they can’t lie about.
They can lie about climate, they can lie about Israel, they can lie about Russia, they can lie about Donald Trump, they can lie about Iran, they can lie about the criminality endemic within Ukraine.
The author would also do well to monitor carefully the rate at which the MSM are losing readers/listeners/viewers. More and more people are simply refusing to have anything to do with them and as a result won’t be getting their news from there.
DTC is a common retail tactic termed ‘direct to consumer’. It is a way of cutting out middleman costs and works well if customers can find the supplier directly and distribution costs DTC are acceptable to the customers.
Increasingly, the internet is about DTC engagement with humanity – I suggest the author starts to think about how to spread climate truth DTC, rather than bemoaning the fact that CNN, the BBC etc etc are- and always will be Establishment liars spreading their journalistic legs for a fat pay check.
Arctic sea ice will be “the canary in the coal mine”, the harbinger of the end of (at least significant) AGW hypothesis. It will be a good riddance.
Hey , we have plenty more canaries where that one came from … ;)
Shades of “No warming since 1998!”
By cherrypicking the outlier 2007 as the starting point you get a spurious “pause” in the ice extent decline.
2007 was “cherry-picked” by IPCC AR4 and Al Gore to start the hysterical screaming about run-away melting and imminent “ice-free” summers (which had to be rapidly redefined as not ice free at all ) when they realised that would never happen.
2012 was cherry-picked by media as OMG , it’s worse than we thought and they remained silent when minimum sea ice volume increased by 65% the following year. Yes +65% in 12 months. Funny no one is aware of that “cherry-picked” fact either.
2007 was also “cherry-picked” by the authors of the paper cited as being a notable change in the nature of the ice flowing through Fram Straight (and they are not making a climate skeptic argument, they analysing the data).
The inflection in the date of minimum shown in figure also shows a change of direction in 2007.
2007 was a bit below the line but there are no “outliers” in that dataset. Even if you ignore that one year, there has clearly been a break from the accelerating “run-away” melting.
Those who insist on reducing everything to a linear trend of the entire dataset fail to report that that “trend” figure is reducing. That is not consistent with “run-away” melting. That interpretation if formally rejected by the data, whether you like 2007 or not.
Take a look at Fig.3 here.
https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
2007 and 2012 show a conspicuous outliers on a fairly linear long term downward trend.
The only use of the word “outlier” in that text is nothing to do with satellite record:
“August 1966 was an outlier with lower extent than July 1966. This is not reasonable given the seasonality of the ice cover. ”
If you are suggesting those “outliers” should be ignored please tell that to MSM , IPCC, and everyone else who focuses on nothing but those years to convince us their is imminent collapse of arctic sea ice. Those are exactly the exceptional years they use to pretend there is a problem.
My analysis shows the pre-2007 was not linear and the suggestion of accelerating melting was reasonable ( without that establishing causality ). I also showed the last 17y do NOT fit continued acceptance of that model.
There is very clearly more going on than a linear decline. If you want to maintain that argument you are going to have to try harder than a simple affirmation that it is “fairly linear” , which meaningless waffle and not supported by the data.
“Take a look at Fig.3 here.”
Well 1996 was an “outlier” too, so if we remove all the data points which diverge from the linear fit we find it fits a linear model. Amazing result. That’s called induction, not data analysis.
I’m with Clive Best here. It is easy to inspect the data, see what you want to see and then choose starting points from which analysis gives you the answer you want. It is therefore a bad idea to break up the data into short time periods. Better to base your trend calculation on it all, from 1979 on.
Statistically the rate of change in ice cover, about 3% per decade, is the same as the internal variability so any statistically significant trend will only show if you have a time series of at least 20 years. 2007 to 2023 is a poor choice because a) it has two very low values at the beginning ( which is probably why Goodman chose it) and b) because it is only 16 years and too short to be meaningful.
Goodman’s subtext is that because 2007 was low the long term decline in ice extent (and therefore global warming) has stopped. It is as invalid as the doomsters saying that September 2023 was exceptionally warm and global warming is therefore running away.
“Goodman’s subtext is that because 2007 was low the long term decline in ice extent (and therefore global warming) has stopped. ”
Classic straw man tactic. Thanks for revealing your political end-point dressed up as a feeble claim that averaging and entire dataset of 16000 points down to a single scalar value is “best”.
“Statistically the rate of change in ice cover, about 3% per decade, is the same as the internal variability so any statistically significant trend will only show if you have a time series of at least 20 years. 2007 to 2023 is a poor choice because a) it has two very low values at the beginning ( which is probably why Goodman chose it) and b) because it is only 16 years and too short to be meaningful.”
What is this “internal variability”, how is it measured and how do you derive the alleged 20y minimum from that ? Assertion gets you nowhere.
You complain about including 2007 but don’t seem to realise that 2007-2023 is 17 values not 16. Not that far from your alleged “minimum” requirement.
Most of the melting occurred between 1997 and 2007, a much shorter period so even less valid.
If you insist that the only valid statistic is a 45y linear trend, it will “correlate” with everything else you chose to look at. That means you have created non falsifiable claims and the whole attribution exercise falls on its arse. Well done.
So we need to stop attempting to turn the world economy upside down and inside out based on a stack of unvalidated, non falsifiable pseudo science.
“Better to base your trend calculation on it all, from 1979 on.”
I’m with Clive Best in this: what you are doing there is to “see what you want to see and then choose starting points from which analysis gives you the answer you want. “
Read about mean, standard deviation and confidence limits and I’ll get back to you.
Do you have the links to the referenced articles?
Sorry they got lost when this was copied to C.Etc. I’ve asked Dr Curry to add them to the article. Here they are in the meantime. (Though I bet this gets held for moderation anyway.)
[1] Climate Central : Arctic Death Spiral: More Bad News about Sea Ice
https://www.climatecentral.org/news/arctic-death-spiral-more-bad-news-about-sea-ice
“The Arctic is in a death spiral. How much longer will it exist?” https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2020/oct/13/arctic-ice-melting-climate-change-global-warming
“Unfortunately it has become too late to save Arctic summer sea ice,” said Prof Dirk Notz, of the University of Hamburg” https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/06/too-late-now-to-save-arctic-summer-ice-climate-scientists-find
[2] NSIDC: ” The last 17 years, from 2007 to 2023, are the lowest 17 sea ice extents in the satellite record.” https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2023/09/arctic-sea-ice-minimum-at-sixth/
[3] NASA Vital Signs: “Key Takeaway: Summer Arctic sea ice extent is shrinking by 12.3% per decade due to warmer temperatures.”
https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/arctic-sea-ice/
[4] Sumata, H., de Steur, L., Divine, D.V. et al. Regime shift in Arctic Ocean sea ice thickness. Nature 615, 443–449 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05686-x
[5] NSIDC Charctic interactive sea ice graph:
https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/
You can find the full reference section here onmy copy. Hopefully this will get corrected here soon.
https://climategrog.wordpress.com/2023/10/21/arctic-sea-ice-the-canary-in-the-coal-mine/
Links now added here. Thanks to J.C.
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All you need to do is look at NSIDC’s most recent reporting (22-Oct-2023), Figure 3, to see what is happening. It is entertaining to see deniers twist themselves into pretzels, massaging inherently noisy data (annual variability) in an attempt to support their agenda. This much like the claim that there was no significant global warming in the decade before 2021 – then came 2022 (and now 2023). I note that the default timeframe for assessing global climate change is 30 years (not 10), and I will trust NSIDC, NASA, and NOAA over the agenda driven analysis and interpretation of a Judith Curry blogspot.
A major climate change transition with respect to arctic sea ice has already taken place: The old, holdover, thick ice is already essentially gone and has been for at least 10 years (NSIDC, fig. 4b). What remains is the annual “new” ice, which will show a higher degree of year-to-year variability. It may even start to grow again if the AMOC continues to slow.
I would add that it might be easier to see what is happening by looking and annual average Arctic sea ice VOLUME;
http://psc.apl.uw.edu/research/projects/arctic-sea-ice-volume-anomaly/
Well that link seems to look about the same : curves down until 2010 and pretty flat ever since.
However, are you aware that we don’t have any data for volume that far back. Most of that PIOMAS record is based on ice area and climate “models”.
Cryosat2 began reporting in 2011 and is our ONLY device designed to measure ice volume. I linked that above. Ice minimum vol is also flat since it began in 2011 .
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/10/21/arctic-sea-ice-the-canary-in-the-coal-mine/#comment-3805274
2012 is about when most of the “old” ice was gone, and you might expect a new dynamic and slope. Nonetheless, the last decade is “pretty flat” is not exactly quantitative. Actually, it is not flat at all: (1) it is quite noisy with year-to-year variability. (2) regression analysis on 2013 – 2023 data yields a slope of -0.047 Mkm^2/year, or -9.9% (95% c.l. -26.1% to +6.4%) per decade, consistent with the 12.8%/decade found for the entire dataset. (3) the correlation coefficient (r = -0.415, r^2 =0.172) and 95% confidence limits indicate that neither you (nor I) can confidently draw even qualitative conclusions about “flatness” with such a limited and noisy data set (although it is consistent with prior decline), and illustrates the problem of “cherry-picking” limited data sets.
Both ice extent and volume are worth examining in their own right. ( Assuming it is actually volume and not assumed thickness times area ).
Ice volume change can be seen as a measure of latent energy of fusion, so a kind of calorimeter. Area, or extent may be more useful in looking for feedbacks since changes in exposed water are more important than changes in ice thickness.
It’s all good stuff if you set out with an enquiring mind rather than an intent to prop up a preconceived attribution hypothesis.
“What remains is the annual ‘new’ ice”.
True in part but don’t get carried away. Look at figure2 here , they are showing levels of 5m and 4m thick ice. That is not single year ice.
My fig.3 also shows date of minimum a few days later than it used to be. However, min extent has no net change in nearly 20y. That means either there is a strong negative ( ie corrective ) feedback or some other strong driving force which over comes the supposed effects of “global warming” plus “arctic amplification” and the “albedo feedback”.
Clearly someone needs to start doing some science here instead of pretending it is run-away melting in an irreversible downward “death spiral”.
Climategrog,
I stand corrected RE “what remains is annual new ice.” It should have read “… mostly annual new ice” I do stand by “The old, holdover, thick ice is already essentially gone and has been for at least 10 years (NSIDC, fig. 4c),” where “old” refers to 4+ years.
I do take exception to your claim,” min extent has no net change in nearly 20y”. Minimum Arctic sea ice extent in 2004 was 5.79 million km^2, in 2023 it was down to 4.37 Mkm^2. That’s a statistically significant decrease of 24.5%
Climategrog,
I stand corrected RE “what remains is annual new ice.” It should have read “… mostly annual new ice”. I do stand by “The old, holdover, thick ice is already essentially gone and has been for at least 10 years (NSIDC, fig. 4c),” where “old” refers to 4+ years.
I do take exception to your claim,” min extent has no net change in nearly 20y”. Minimum Arctic sea ice extent in 2004 was 5.79 million km^2, in 2023 it was down to 4.37 Mkm^2. That’s a statistically significant decrease of 24.5%. At any rate, it is not a “death spiral” – At this point, it seems to be, within the limits of annual internal variability, well described by a linear decline. Ultimately, it will probably look like a sigmoidal state transition.
Thanks for correcting your claim about it all being new annual ice. If old=>4y that makes more sense but since ice has never got even close to disappearing I don’t see the logic for claiming that a some of it is not 10 or 20y old. If it never melted some of it just be at least that old. That there is not a 5m thick layer which is intact for that period is another , different claim.
“I do take exception to your claim,” min extent has no net change in nearly 20y”. Minimum Arctic sea ice extent in 2004 was 5.79 million km^2”.
Clearly the “nearly 20y” refers to the 17y I wrote about in the article. Calculating the slope of 20y is discussing something different to what I said. So you “take exception” and instead of providing a counter argument to what I said you present a calculation of something else. That’s called a straw man fallacy.
“2012 is about when most of the “old” ice was gone, and you might expect a new dynamic and slope. ” Yes, there was a new dynamic. If you refer to the real volume data CPOM there was an 12mo increase of 65% ice volume which I have already pointed to . Sadly no one is aware of that FACT. OK “pretty flat” was imprecise language in that comment. In the article I refered to “net zero change”. Clearly it is not flat as in no change at all.
” regression analysis on 2013 – 2023 data yields a slope of -0.047 Mkm^2/year … and illustrates the problem of “cherry-picking” limited data sets.”
OK so why not look at the slope of CPOM October data over the full record. It is slightly negative slope but does not look like it will be gone any time this century. But that is the problem with unfounded extrapolation, it is based on the spurious caveat: ” if it continues at the current rate” , which of course it never does. But the underlying implication of this is ” if we don’t change our entire way of life because we are entirely the cause of this change. Never openly declared so that it can be challenged or rebutted but that is the implied message.
Of course the record is still too short to draw firm conclusions, let alone attribution, yet this exactly what was done in 2007 by all those Nobel Prize winning scientists and the record was far shorter then.
My point in this article is that this is not a linear process and we need to start doing some serious objective science before turning the world econony inside out. Sadly we have defunded and excommunicated all the objective scientists and Nature just RETRACTED a perfectly valid scientific paper for wrong think, not invalid science.
If that “trend” continues we are all screwed.
I simply responded to some of your “eyeball” evaluations with actual data analysis.
As for your “However, min extent has no net change in nearly 20y”. I did provide a counter example: I CALCULATED the sea ice extent decline over the last 20 years (2004 – 2023), responding precisely to your sentence (not something else, as you claim) – and showed that the claim of “zero net change” over the last 17 (or 20) years was false. That is not a straw man fallacy.
I do not refer to the CPOM data set, to which you deflect, because (1) we had been discussing sea ice extent, and CPOM only give thickness and volume data and (2) I had already given a (passing) reference to volume data that (3) covers the full 44 years of satellite data – showing the long-term linear decline whereas (4) there is only 11 years of CPOM data – not enough to see any “trends” (or, as you say, draw conclusions) as I already pointed out for the 2013 – 2023 extent data.
The material after the CPOM comment is basically political and bias speculation – doesn’t interest me.
One last question: Why do you start your quadratic fit to the extent data in 1991 – what is the result if you use the full data set? (By “eyeballing” looks like a classic case of data truncation to fit one’s agenda).
There’s never been much “old ice”. It moves around so much that different parts melt each year. Even early observations had very little ice over 10yrs old.
In October 2019 NSIDC made this graph, which shows that the 2007-2019 trend in September Arctic sea ice extent was the flattest 13-year trend in the whole record. Now we have the flattest 17-year trend in the whole record. CO2 emissions setting records, all the alleged positive feedbacks and we have the record setting flat trend in Arctic sea ice?
https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/1999/10/Sep_monthly_extents13yr.png
Alternately you can describe a pattern in which extent drops below the trend between 2007 and 2014, and then returns to the trend.
If you are honest, you can describe a pattern where it started below the trend in 1979, showed minimal decline before 1997, by which time it was consistently above the “trend”, then the steep decline and period notably below the “trend” finally turning to the trend. ie it is anything but a linear relationship.
The point of this analysis was that the claims of “accelerating” melting made in 2007, though a reasonable model for the data at that time, are no longer consistent with the data collected since.
If you are arguing for a fixed linear trend ( which get less and less fixed over time ) you are agreeing that we are not seeing accelerated or “run away” melting , tipping points or a “death spiral” in the Arctic . Thank you.
I’m quite happy with interpreting the data as showing a constant rate of change in the long term.
The differences in opinion centre around the unusually low values for 2007 and 2012.
If you plot a polynomial for the data ending after 2012 you get an accelerating decline.
If you plot a linear regression starting in 2007 you get a pause.
If you plot a linear regression for 1979 to 2023 you get an underlying constant rate of decline.
Which you regard as correct depends on your personal bias. Of the.three, using the full 1979-2023 trend removes any need to choose start dates.
This is why I’m not keen to break up the data into shorter periods. The shorter the period, the less significant the outcome. There’s also the danger that conscious of unconscious bias influences the choice of start and end years.
It may be coincidence that Goodman’s choice of 2007 as a starting point gives the lowest rate of decline you can squeeze out of the data and is the only start date which gives a pause. Starting with any other year would give a decline.
Climategrog,
I fully understand year-to-year internal variability (and measurement statistical variability). Why do you deflect to detailed understanding of microvariablity of local climates (weather) when we are discussing the long term decline in Arctic sea ice minimum extent? It is quite clear that it has dropped by approximately 40% over the satellite measurement period, and whatever data truncation or short term variability you chose to deflect to, does not change that.
thanks for that link Edim. It seems NSIDC were a bit more objective 5y ago. See the second link under figure2 which leads to this graph:
https://climategrog.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/ct_ice_area_short_anom_nh_2015_final.png
Slope was increasing for a while now decreasing , if I re-ran that for latest data the fine section would be close to zero slope. That does start to look more cyclic. Sadly the Cyrosphere Today crowd stopped maintaining that dataset when it stopped supporting the narrative . ( Just coincidental timing, not causation, I’m sure ).
I think that is cherry-picking by omission. In the same graph, they show another 13 year section 1999 – 2012, that partial overlaps with the one you reference, and has more than twice the (negative) slope as the whole data set. Taken together, they are a “wash”. This demonstrates two things (1) people on this site tend to cherry-pick and truncate data sets to get the results they want and to reinforce the echo chamber. (2) WMO recommends a default 30 year period for evaluating climate changes, with good reason.
https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2019/10/ (Fig. 3b)
“WMO recommends a default 30 year period for evaluating climate changes, with good reason.”
A 30y average is insufficient in the presence of 60y cycles. But that is intended to look at long term warming. That does not mean that if you want to understand forces driving regional variation you have to throw out all your high precision, high temporal resolution data.
It is abundantly obvious there is far more going on in the Arctic than a simplistic linear change. If you want to understand what is driving change and understand and quantify feedbacks you cannot do it by throwing out all the temporal variation you have detected.
The insistence on reducing 16000+ data points to a trivial scalar trend, is that it suits your preconceived attributional claims and you do not want any data which may show other forces at work and spoil your narrative. That is the ultimate “cherry-pick”. Maybe you think no one will realise if you cherry pick in the frequency domain !
Taken together, they are a “wash”. Ah that must some advanced statistical term I missed when studying Physics.
“In the same graph, they show another 13 year section 1999 – 2012, that partial overlaps with the one you reference, and has more than twice the (negative) slope as the whole data set. ”
Exactly, so in 2019, even NSIDC were trying to draw attention to the notable REDUCTION in the rate of melting. Apparently that scientific integrity has now been corrected. This year they “cherry-picked” the same 17y that I did, to say they were the lowest on record but failed to report the statistically zero trend over the same data.
According to your logic they should have reported that the last 45y were also the lowest 45y on record !
It would be instructive to determine if the regime change is represented by a break point and the confidence interval for the break point.
I don’t know, but the graphs look like partial coverage of a 60-year+ sine wave, nothing like a constantly increasing CO2-driven pattern. There are numerous references to 60 to 70-year cycles in climate data.
there is evidence of at least three 60y cycles in N. Altantic SST. I don’t think I can anything resembling a sine wave in the data presented here, though.
Hi Greg, I’m with you that many observers underestimated the internal variability af the Arctic Sea Ice to 2012 or so. They concluded (premature as we know in 2023) that the September minimum depends mostly on the global forcing and extended ( unscientific) exponential or other fits leading to a loss of summer Sea Ice very soon. This was fraudulent. However, I’m not in doubt that the forcing itself has an influence. I tried it with a different approach: https://judithcurry.com/2023/06/15/is-the-arctic-september-sea-ice-doomed-to-disappear-in-the-2030s/
In fact it’s a simple EBM, leading to the conclusion that some ice free Septembers in the Arctic ( less than 1 Mio km² SIE) are not possible as early as after 2060. Do you agree (or partly) with rhis approach?
best Frank
Hi Frank. I do not think any climate models are of any use whatsoever because they are all tweaked to give a high sensitivity to CO2. Literally dozens of poorly constrained parameters are freely manipulated yet only get a rather poor fit to 1960-1990 period and the right average in late 19th c.
GISS team admit in Hansen et al 2002 that you can basically get a climate model to produce whatever sensitivity you wish.
NONE of the individual models produce the early 20th c. warming because they are basically CO2 + noise ( with exaggerated volcanic forcing to give a convincing little dip in 1991-94).
If they cannot even reproduce past variability why the hell do we imagine they can model the future? Show me a climate model which has steep warming in early 20th c. and I will be prepared to look again.
So for that reason I would say starting point of model ERF is invalid so whatever you do from there on is doomed to be irrelevant.
The model “forcings” are all nearly straight lines and as your residuals show sea ice extent is nothing like a linear change. Sea ice is not determined by radiative forcing or air temperature it is ocean currents transporting heat to the poles plus what I suspect is a net negative feedback from more open water.
A technical criticism of your method is that you are doing OLS regression on your scatter plot with significant error (noise) in the “controlled variable”: which is not a controlled variable. This leads to regression dilution. Plot your data without the line and fit a slope by eye you will find it is steeper. That would mean an earlier end to ice by your method. Invert the axes and it will bias the other way.
I wrote about this in detail here:
https://climategrog.wordpress.com/2014/03/08/on-inappropriate-use-of-ols/
Sorry to be a negative on your effort but climate modelling is a combination of hubris and bias confirmation when it is not outright politics and fraud. If you even start to believe they show something real you are falling for the lie.
As the IPCC wrote in 2001, the climate is a chaotic, non-linear system which cannot be modelled numerically. We should have taken note before they removed that advice.
Climate models initially under-estimated ice melting because they have close to zero understanding of the processes involved. When we saw rapid ice loss from 1997-2012 they tweaked to models to get closer. Then the ice stopped melting and shows net zero change of 17y, so now the models give too much rapid melting and no slow down because they have close to zero understanding and no mechanism which can produce a slow down let alone 17y of no change.
In short they are of zero use. We need to recognise that fact before we destroy society but I fear there is already too much momentum and at least two generations are completely indoctrinated at this stage.
We have abondonned the age of reason, objective science and are heading, not to a climate crisis, but a climate politics crisis. By the time our generation is gone no one will even remember how science is supposed to work.
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This is the best explanation of “Sea Lioning” I have seen. Brings to mind a certain, occasional participant here.
Sealioning originates with this comic and refers to the practice of persistent questions and constant “I’m just trying to have a reasonable discussion” as a guise to agitate and provoke your opponent, while hiding the fact you have an entrenched position.
An example could be if I hated Destiny and I came to this sub to “just ask questions” about “all these controversies” I’ve heard about Destiny, and present myself as a relatively neutral person just looking to get informed, and every time I get one answered I either keep drilling down with questions on it or simply bring up a new one. Then, if someone refuses to discuss or keep answering me, I act dumbfounded and say stuff like “What’s wrong with just asking questions?”. It’s extremely easy for me, bc I can stay on the offensive through questions (while acting like I’m not) while not having to defend anything myself, while you keep needing to provide much longer answers.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Destiny/comments/s7hueb/debate_vocabulary_list/
I’m not sure what your point is but I NEVER read anything on reddit since they Banned any contrarian posts on climate way back in something like 2010. I’m not interested in reading one side of a story where any discussion is banned.
Is it true that when floating ice melts the level of the surrounding water does not rise? I know this to be true of a lump of ice floating in a bucket of water but does it apply to sea ice around the arctic and Antarctic?
Yes. On the orher hand, melting glaciers and ice caps, which are on land, will increase sea levels.
Thanks Edim, I do understand the difference. I ask because there has been something in the news recently about the West Antarctic ice shelf melting. Some of the reports are ambiguous about whether or not it would cause sea level rise. One report in the Independent said –
“Still, Dr Naughten said that separate research suggests that the melting will contribute to around three feet (one metre) of global sea level rise by 2100 – an alarming prospect for hundreds of coastal cities around the world.”
But it was not clear if this was referring to sea ice melting or land ice melting. My understanding was that the temperature over the Antarctic land area was always well below zero.
oomhead
Here is that study.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-023-01818-x
The study dealt with ice shelves in the Amundsen Sea region. There really wasn’t anything new, but it certainly received much coverage by the media.
Just like nearly everything else in AGW, the news coverage glosses over the complexities, uncertainties and gaps of knowledge regarding these forecasts.
This study by SCAMBOS is a good primer on the dynamics and need for more understanding about the future contribution to SLR from WAIS, and in particular the Amundsen Sea Region and more specifically the Doomsday Thwaites Glacier. The study points out, among many other things, that conditions for greater instability have changed in the last few hundred years. One study Abrams, 2013 concluded warming in Antarctica began in the 1400s.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092181811630491X
One of the maps in this study shows ice loss at very high levels
https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S092181811630491X-gr1.jpg
Which is also the region with the highest readings of geothermal activity
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/cms/asset/4456b766-f316-405b-b550-343c91aea98b/ggge22402-fig-0001-m.jpg
IPCC6 found the most recent measured rate of SLR from Antarctica was about 4 inches per century. This study, while not consensus, projects a fall of 22mm by 2100.
https://tc.copernicus.org/articles/16/4053/2022/
There are still too many uncertainties to move to Denver.
cerescokid,
“Just like nearly everything else in AGW, the news coverage glosses over the complexities, uncertainties and gaps of knowledge regarding these forecasts.”
But the scientific studies and literature do not. Pointing out and testing the uncertainties in (partially) accepted theories is one of the major driving forces in the advancement of science. Science cannot be held responsible for what, and how, the “news” chooses to cover something.
The conclusion is pretty obvious, if you want to understand something in science, pay attention to the science, not sensationalistic news about it. And try to avoid hyperbolic exaggerations without specification, such as, “like nearly everything else in AGW, …”.
ganon
I understand your point but how many people actually read the science? Very few. Where do they get their information? From the media and politicians and activists in climate science. Anyone reading the actual papers recognizes that the authors freely explain the uncertainties and knowledge gaps. But that is not in the public sphere. So, those climate hustlers take advantage of the gap between what the science says and what is part of perennial promotion.
As a case in point is the breathless coverage of a report just out that says the earth is under siege. Really? Looking at the totality of evidence, including paleo reconstructions, I would say we have pretty much what one would expect coming out of the Little Ice Age, being in the warm phase of the AMO, following Modern Solar Maximum, dealing with large uncertainty about pre 1900 global temperatures, added AGW and questioning what UHI effect might be and wondering about the integrity of current data.
I don’t see much evidence of a siege in a simple view of this tidal gauge.
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/plots/120-012_meantrend.png
cerescokid,
“I don’t see much evidence of a siege in a simple view of this tidal gauge.”
Do you realize you are doing what you accuse the media of doing? That is, cherry-picking a single point to draw a false conclusion. Warenmuende, Germany, which is undergoing isostatic rebound from being under the Northern European ice sheet during the last glacial period. The appropriate data for the global “siege”, would be the NOAA data for global average sea level rise:
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-sea-level
Which shows 25 cm sea level rise (1880 – present), and further shows (even visually) that a linear fit is not appropriate: while sea lever rise averaged around 1.4 mm/year for most of the 20th century, it has averaged 3.6 mm/year for the last decade. And, of course, if one wishes to be alarmed or deny, one should reference the whole NOAA 2022 sea level technical report:
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/hazards/sealevelrise/sealevelrise-tech-report-sections.html
(full document PDF download therein).
As for the general public and the media, what can I say: (1) The media has freedom of speech and clicks/sales are more important than the whole truth; whereas science has internal mechanisms, both short-term (peer review) and long-term (independent testing and observation) that attempt to maintain “truth”, completeness, and objectivity. As for understanding the science – those who do not read the scientific literature, will not understand it, those that do read it and have sufficient background have a good chance of understanding it.
In the 30 years of the satellite era there has been virtually no acceleration in the rate of sea level rise. Sea level is still rising at a rate of under one foot for 100 years. There is no climate crisis related to sea level
Oooh ok.
“The relative sea-level acceleration, reliable only in The Battery, is about +0.008 mm/yr². This acceleration is about the same as the world average long-term trend tide gauge, as well as the average long-term trend tide gauge of the East Coast of North America. ”
From Boretti 2021.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2468013320300474#bib0022
The rates don’t mean as much as the acceleration. Which isn’t much.
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/plots/680-140_meantrend.png
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/plots/9410170_meantrend.png
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/plots/1612340_meantrend.png
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/plots/9410660_meantrend.png
Cerescokid.
Still cherry-picking – do you think 5 hand-selected single locations refute the Global Mean Sea Level (GMSL)data? At least three of them are known to have vertical land rise (which makes sea level rise look smaller): LA and San Diego – Pacific plate subduction, Hawaii – sitting on a rising magma bubble. As for the acceleration in New York (no uncertainty given); for global data see “Persistent acceleration in global sea-level rise since the 1960s”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0531-8
… Furthermore, a significant acceleration of the global sea level rise (SLR) since the 1960s, fitting a quadratic curve, is now well established up to 0.07 mm. yr^(−2) in the subtropical North Atlantic (Dangendorf et al., 2019;Haigh et al., 2014). …
Also, as previously suggested, read the NOAA 2022 sea level rise technical report:
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/hazards/sealevelrise/sealevelrise-tech-report.html
In particular, table 2.2, which predicts another 24 cm of GMSL rise and 38 cm for the USMSL rise by 2050 using the currently fit accelerations.
You missed the .008mm/yr2 about same as world average for the acceleration.
And here is one of the most cited studies that found GMSLR acceleration of only .009mm/yr2, about same as the Boretti study.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10712-011-9119-1
This study found .0128mm/yr2.
https://meridian.allenpress.com/jcr/article-abstract/37/2/272/450977/Sea-Level-Acceleration-Analysis-of-the-World-s?redirectedFrom=fulltext
None of the above studies found any acceleration alarming.
Your graph is junk science, euphemistically referred to as satellite altimetry data. The studies finding errors, biases, recalibrations, drift, corrections make that graph worthless with unacceptable uncertainties. Just a few of many.
https://rjes.wdcb.ru/v18/2018ES000638/2018ES000638.pdf
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-020-00786-7
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10712-022-09758-5
ceresecokid,
I will simply refer you to one of the references that you quoted and is reasonably up-to-date.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-020-00786-7
See figure 5 (a and b): Sea level rise trend (1993 – 2019): 0.35 mm/yr; sea level acceleration: 0.24 mm/yr^2. I simply note that this acceleration is 30 times as large as your original (and old) cherry- picked value of 0.008 mm/yr^2.
“Your graph is junk science, euphemistically referred to as satellite altimetry data.”
(1) it is not my graph, it is NOAA’s. (2) If you think NOAA’s data is junk and worthless, why did you cherry-pick and post so many of their single-location graphs?
Thanks for the information.
ceresokid,
My mistake: Boretti is not old.
With acceleration uncertainty of 0.057 to 0.12 mm which makes my point and makes the numbers meaningless.
cerescokid,
“With acceleration uncertainty of 0.057 to 0.12 mm which makes my point and makes the numbers meaningless.”
No and no, That is the range of uncertainties for individual satellite locations, with a mean uncertainty of 0.062 and is statistically significant, not meaningless, and at least as good, percentage wise, as your original single-point cherry of 0.00849 +/- 0.00388 mm/yr^2. Thus, your point is not made.
I’ve seen the NOAA graph you linked hundreds of times. It’s still based on junk science.
The original paper on Amundsen Sea glaciers and the findings based on satellite data have 1 thing in common. They are predicated on remarkable coincidences.
The satellite data began in 1992-93. If you have read all the papers I’ve read they say the acceleration began in the same time frame. What a remarkable coincidence. The very location that is under discussion the most in all the Antarctica papers about the possibility of runaway sea level rise is in the WAIS region and the Amundsen Sea location, which is also the very area with the highest readings of geothermal activity. What a remarkable coincidence.
The complexities and uncertainties in both issues are underplayed in the public discourse. The studies deal with them but the establishment narrative glosses over it all.
Antarctica has undergone vast changes over the Holocene at various time scales, decadal, multi decadal, centennial, multi centennial and multi millennia. This paper suggests that models don’t acknowledge that variability.
https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE%7CA476578673&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=634b4299
This paper is one of dozens that discuss the geothermal issue in WAIS. Even though there is vast research indicating impacts on ice sheet and glacial dynamics, the IPCC6 report is completely silent.
And just so you know those specific tidal gauge graphs weren’t non representative, here are 375 which show basically the same thing. A lack of significant and obvious acceleration, which was the finding of those papers I linked.
Each location has its own unique characteristics because of local geomorphology and geological conditions, vertical uplift or subsidence, but all without the frightening runaway SLR that is portrayed in the public sphere.
http://www.sealevel.info/MSL_global_thumbnails5.html
@ganon1950 – you can’t calculate a valid mean uncertainty from disparate tidal gauges. They aren’t measuring exactly the same thing. The various locations of the gauges have varying degrees of subsidence.
cerescokid,
I have a couple more amazing coincidences that you forgot to mention.
* Loss of mountain glaciers has been accelerating.
* Greenland ice sheet has been losing (absolute) mass twice as fast as Antarctica, much faster as a percentage.
* The oceans have been warming up, and the thermal expansion of water is well known – it accounts for roughly half of observed sea level rise.
* Satellite MSL data is more precise than tidal station data, although it is checked by overlap with the tidal data.
* Tidal station data actually shows greater acceleration than the satellite data (https://www.globalchange.gov/indicators/sea-level-rise)
* acceleration is not a constant – the rate of acceleration can increase if the force(ing) increases – for Ice shelves and sea ice that would be delta T (ocean contact) above 0 C. (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-67534-0, Fig. 1)
* Geothermal heat transfer under the WAIS (probably) did not start just when it was discovered and considered as a melting source – considering the timescale of geothermal heat flux, that would be quite a coincidence.
* There are many contributions to sea level rise (https://sealevel.nasa.gov/news/191/nasa-led-study-reveals-the-causes-of-sea-level-rise-since-1900). Pseudo-scientists have a tendency to focus on one aspect of a multi-faceted problem that supports their agenda, and either ignore other contributions (above), or if they are forced to consider data that does not support their agenda, they dismiss it as “junk science” and become angry.
Ciao.
Your last link is timely since it points out the vast problem not with global sea level rise but rather subsidence, in a lot of cases at rates multiple of GMSLR. Here are a couple of studies demonstrating how extensive subsidence is across the globe. This study identified nearly 900 locations that have relative SLR at rates higher than the global SLR rates.
https://academic.oup.com/gji/article/210/1/148/3739342
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048969721012602
This quote is from Kleinherenbrink 2019 who found acceleration at the same rate as Dangendorf, who you quoted above.
“ The uncertainties in the altimetry-derived estimate, however, cause the same acceleration to become statistically equivalent to zero at a 95%-confidence level.”
You need to realize that the dynamics involved with the ice sheet and glaciers are time variable because of subglacial hydrology and topography, so that the pulsing and loss of ice can vary on decadal and multi decadal scales.
However, Schroeder 2014, in fact found temporal variability in the geological activity. Given that region has been observed only since the early 1990s, the period is too short to make any long term predictions.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1405184111
cerescokid,
Nice deflection. I am quite aware of vertical land surface movement (subsidence and rise) – I was the one that brought it up (indirectly in my final bullet point). To first order, isostatic rebound should cancel to (near) zero. The other major effect is human withdrawal of near coastal groundwater, causing local subsidence, and (eventually) returns that water to the oceans, causing additional (real) sea level rise. Just another human contribution to make the problem worse.
“ To first order, isostatic rebound should cancel to (near) zero.”
No, GIA is in the high latitudes of NH. Look at the map in my link which shows where the subsidence problems are. Much much more coverage than the GIA locations.
” Look at the map in my link which shows where the subsidence problems are.”
No thanks, I’d prefer to find map(s) on my own.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PGR_Paulson2007_Rate_of_Lithospheric_Uplift_due_to_post-glacial_rebound.png
Like I said:
“ To first order, isostatic rebound should cancel to (near) zero.”
In other words, the post-glacial rebound (rise) is pretty much cancelled by subsidence of the periphery bulge.
As I already indicated, subsidence due to groundwater removal is another matter. I hope the difference is understood.
Geological changes are only a part of the problem. There are hundreds of tidal gauges around the globe measuring the subsidence from building compression
and liquid abstraction. Those locations and tidal gauge measurements create a bias for how much the data represent VLM. Studies have shown that. If you had actually done some research you would have known that. Try to catch up. I’m beginning to understand why you think the way you do.
This study might have something to it.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F6d5Lz7WUAAMgtP?format=jpg&name=large
Cesesscokid,
Like I already said, other human effects adding to the problem.
Tidal stations: just another reason why the satellite measurements are better. Thanks for that.
Cerescokid,
I think you presume way too much about what I do and don’t know, and then present those false presumptions as insults. But that’s OK I understand the anger and just take it as an expression of an Adler superiority < inferiority complex. I also think I've been pretty patient about answering all your sea-lion deflections, particularly since you rarely acknowledge my answers – I take that to mean I'm correct, and you have no substantial response – instead, you just move on to the next, sometimes tangential, deflection. I grow weary of the endless whataboutism, so I'll just wish you a good life, kid, and hope that you eventually get over your insecure anger and sophomoric Dunning-Kruger phase.
You are adept at psychobabble and parroting the establishment and media narrative but have demonstrated little knowledge of the actual peer literature. After I linked to a single tidal gauge chart you complained about cherry picking but deflected when I linked to 375 stations. As stated before, the rate of one or all the stations are not important. It’s that they don’t, individually or collectively, show significant acceleration. The links to studies of global and selective tidal gauges demonstrate that.
The Prandi study of satellite data,in fact, states in the conclusion the uncertainty is local and global.
The discussion about non geological subsidence is important because given the extensive record across the globe, that factor could be influencing even the small acceleration found in the tidal gauge links above. A crayon graph from NOAA doesn’t refute the actual studies finding a lack of significant acceleration.
Back to my original comment about Antarctica. The estimates of future sea level rise from the Amundsen Sea region are all over the place. From catastrophic to a fall. But the establishment and media narrative include only the worst, not the least, and not the uncertainties. The Seroussi paper below says over the next 50 years it could be only 1.3 cc.
The Davis paper below says over thousands of years (plural thousands), it could be catastrophic, but also highlights the extreme uncertainties and points out that canonical models are inappropriate. The public thinks the extreme threat is the next decade. This paper, and others, express concern over a very long time. And as many papers say, science has been actually observing the dynamics involved in that region for a few decades, even though the literature finds variability over the Holocene.
These two papers, and virtually all the others, make it clear that temperature of the surrounding waters is only one of many, many factors dictating the rate of melting, and because of that, there are still significant unknowns about what the SLR contribution will be for 2100.
Citing the consensus doesn’t do much. Science is not a popularity contest.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05586-0
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2017GL072910
Ice shelves are nominally floating, but they are land anchored and can/do have substantially more of their volume fraction above sea level than free floating sea ice, particularly close to the land anchoring line.
https://earthsky.org/upl/2015/03/antarctic-ice-shelf-diagram.jpg
The problem is not surface melting from the atmosphere, but rather melting from beneath by the ocean on which it is floating. This can destabilize the ice shelf and increase iceberg calving, which does raise sea level. Of course, without warming, this is a long-term quasi equilibrium process; however, warming of the oceans is changing currents (and wind patterns) and warmer currents from the southern oceans are starting to penetrate and warm the Antarctic circumpolar current. Hence, increased bottom side melting and destabilization of the ice shelves.
“this is a long-term quasi equilibrium process”
Oh, so you are a climate change denier. Thanks for clarifying your position.
This spurious and arbitrary assumption is what is at the heart of the CO2 attribution.
The Western Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) is the segment of the continental ice sheet that covers West Antarctica,. The WAIS is a marine-based ice sheet, meaning that its bed lies well below sea level and its edges flow into floating ice shelves.
Now, the alarmism is that these marine ice sheets can potentially “destabilize in a runaway fashion” and cause increased melting of ice shelfs, land-based outlet glaciers and ice caps. Something like that. I think the alarmism is baseless, whatever is happening is natural, not unusual and it happened many times in various cycles and timescales.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Antarctic_Ice_Sheet
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_ice_sheet_instability
So we have a canary in the coal mine, but we don’t know if it is alive or dead? Schrödinger’s canary ..
No, we have a canary but refuse to notice it is still bright yellow and chirping gaily. That is the whole point of this article. Virtually no one outside those involved in measurements is aware we still have the same cover as in 2007 when all the extreme predictions got world wide press coverage. Those in the field are carefully crafting their official statements to hide this fact as I pointed out in the links to NASA and NSIDC public bulletins.
Greg.
“
“Climatologists frequently explain the idea of the ‘albedo feedback’ whereby less ice leads to more solar energy entering the sea, causing warmer waters, more ice melting, more solar … and a “tipping point” being reached where irreversible, run-away melting would occur. This explanation, while plausible, is of a naive simplicity and does not even examine what other effects more open water may have and what other feedbacks, positive or negative, may come into play.”
I have yet to read an article by an alarmist that cites “albedo feedback” that even mentions Fresnel’s Equation — let alone gives any indication that they understand that it provides a way to calculate the specular reflectance based on the refractive index and angle of incidence.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/09/12/why-albedo-is-the-wrong-measure-of-reflectivity-for-modeling-climate/
“I have yet to read an article by an alarmist that cites “albedo feedback” that even mentions Fresnel’s Equation”,
Perhaps the “alarmists” are just aware that snow/ice albedo is not as simple as refractive index and incidence/reflectance angle. Perhaps they realize that the complexities of microstructure, age, “dirtiness” – dust and black carbon, etc. are important and require actual measurements (satellites are wonderful things). Scientists (as opposed to “alarmists”) are aware of both.
https://tc.copernicus.org/articles/14/1497/2020/
Thanks for the link.
“Spectral albedo measurements over snow-covered slopes”
So this has nothing to do with the point I raised and quotes by Clyde, which was about albedo of open water compared to sea ice. You seem scientifically literate and able to search the literature, why did you chose to post an unrelated paper instead of addressing the question.
Perhaps “alarmists” are also avoiding the question.
I did have an email exchange with a Canadian climate scientist who had organised a field trip in the Arctic doing spectral measurements under the ice to look in the effects of different thicknesses of ice. Oddly he told me he never did ANY measurements on open water … or chose not to report those measurements.
Greg.
climategrog,
My apologies, here is a reference to ocean albedo using Fresnel’s Equation, as well as other relevant parameters (unspecified by Clyde):
“Measurements at a sea platform show that the ocean
surface albedo is highly variable and is sensitive to four
physical parameters: solar zenith angle, wind speed,
transmission by atmospheric cloud/aerosol, and ocean
chlorophyll concentration”
It comes from that “alarmist” organization NASA and is nearly 20 years old. (If you do not look, you will not see)
GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 31, L22301, doi:10.1029/2004GL021180, 2004
Greg,
“You seem scientifically literate and able to search the literature”
Yes, I have a B.S. and M.S. in chemistry and a PhD in physics (experimental high resolution optical spectroscopy and “nebenfach” of non-linear dynamics – NLD mostly unused, but now relevant) and a 35-year career as a national laboratory research scientist (mostly lasers + mass spectrometry applied to nuclear forensics). I am most definitely not a climatologist – it has only been a serious interest for 6 months or so, and I’m still at the textbook learning stage (paleoclimatology, climatology, atmospheric science, glaciology, oceanography, biogeochemistry), no doubt there are still holes in my knowledge (particularly multidimensional data analysis), but my background facilitates rapid learning. Yes, literature research capabilities are quite good, as needed and developed over the research career; however, now being retired, I am often frustrated by pay-walls, (note to self – start using direct author requests for electronic PDFs).
Thanks for the link. I have seen the Chesapeake study. But it did not seem particularly useful. It’s a start but seems flawed in that it is only seems to be assessing direct reflection while they say that at low angles of incidence ( most relevant to the Arctic ) AOD reduces albedo. It is unclear how they can assess “upwelling” radiation from a single observation point. Satellites use full spherical coverage to assess outward fluxes. Their figures of max 0.30 albedo cannot account for much of the scatter light. They do not address this point.
Clearly reflection off water with waves, crests and high winds and marine aerosols is very complex which just underlines the stupidity of the simplistic albedo feedback argument we are always fed as the basis of run-away melting.
I appreciate your background . My training is in physics too and I’m appalled by what passes as science in climatology.
Many estimations of climate sensitivity are based on spurious use of OLS with error ridden “controlled variable” always executed in the sense where the regression dilution exaggerates the result.
https://climategrog.wordpress.com/2014/03/08/on-inappropriate-use-of-ols/
This was even discussed in Forster & Gregory 2006 (carefully buried in the appendix) but they still manage to plot the dependent variable ( temperature ) on the x axis.
http://www.image.ucar.edu/idag/Papers/Forster_sensitivity.pdf
If you are new to this you may still be under that false assumption that most of this is honest objective science. That is where I was in 2007 and where Judith Curry was in 2005-2006 until she realised she ought to check the data instead of relying of good faith of climatologists.
Trying to reduce a massively complex, chaotic, highly non-linear system to a single variable is fascicle, yet we are asked to believe this is the “settled science” which justifies destroying out entire way of life and returning to serfdom. This is global politics not science.
As a retired PhD from a field unrelated to meteorology or atmospheric physics, it occurs to me: I ought aggressively to defend the simplistic mainstream / government point of view that anthropogenic CO2 is causing the Arctic to melt and the world to boil and people to die, for there’s so much gratification in that theory and so much money – hundreds of billions of $! Not just from current Western governments and rich universities but from flush green capitalists searching for degree-laden experts like me to help increase their returns. Yes, perhaps I could make a name for myself, a lucrative third career as a climate-change authority. All I’d have to do is erase all doubt and show absolute certainty and argue against every alternate view ensuring it gets no air and appears to be discredited.
And what is there on the side of uncertainty and skepticism for a poor retired fool like me?
No appreciation, no money… marginalisation, opprobrium. Violent youngsters might even spit on me.
All I’d be left with is an old open mind.
Or you could study the science with an open mind and not worry about attacking or defending anything. As an old chemist/physicist, I happen to have rather quickly reached a conclusion, but I still have an open mind, interested in the science – that’s why I am here.
P.S. Many of your comments, and their tone, don’t support your implication of an “open mind”. It is quite clear that you have already made up your mind and ascribe to conspiracy theories rather than believing climate change is a serious subject that deserves lots of study. Real science starts with questions (not “agendas”) followed by hypotheses and testing thereof. Tests of the hypotheses that (try to) disprove them are welcome (many of them discussed here). If they succeed, they result in modification and retesting or discarding the hypothesis. If they fail, it adds support to the hypothesis – the so called “proof by falsification”. A refresher on the philosophy of science might be in order.
ganon, your idealism is admirable; perhaps you are being constructive and not just attacking those who cast doubt on your assumptions.
Unlike you, the only conclusion I’ve reached after decades worrying about climate for my work is: I don’t know much of anything because all the systems are frankly too complex, and, as far as I’ve seen, there is no certainty about what will happen five years from now or a decade after that.
Perhaps because my conclusions are so modest, I dislike the arrogance of climate-change certainty and I cheer for new perspectives and I cheer for humility.
Btw do not worry about extinctions. It’s a wonderful time for plantlife on Earth.
Botanist,
I agree, the future is uncertain – it is a very complex system, full of interconnected chaotically cyclical subsystems. My worry is about the unknown results of a large, rapid, unnatural perturbation of an important climate variable. The resulting change in the trajectory of a normally constrained chaotic system is unknown and once it has “jumped the attractor” it could result in anything from a new glacial period, or a return to “hothouse” conditions with anoxic oceans, or perhaps no gigantic change at all if negative feedbacks kick in soon enough. There is no certainty, but understanding as much as one can is helpful in planning for, and trying to minimize, negative outcomes.
I’m not worried about plant extinctions. There is already plenty of evidence in the animal kingdom.
https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/biodiversity/decline-and-extinction/
I’d start with paleoclimatology, which has already happened and is thus largely devoid of emotional and political pressures, yet gives a very good understanding of present climatology and how it is studied. Perhaps the textbook:
Paleoclimatology: From Snowball Earth to the Anthropocene, by Colin P. Summerhayes, 560 pp. (2020). It takes a historical approach and is very readable, with plenty of literature references if one wishes to delve deeper.
Ganon1950: “There is no certainty, but understanding as much as one can is helpful in planning for, and trying to minimize, negative outcomes.”
This is the most sensible sentence. In the struggle of man against nature man has clearly established superiority using the tools of technology, including fossil fuels. The struggle of man against himself it’s still too close to call.
ganon: “There is no certainty, but understanding as much as one can is helpful in planning for, and trying to minimize, negative outcomes.”
A very sensible position, which is exactly why I published this examination of the present state of change observed in the Arctic which disproves the idea of uncontrolled run-away melting due to a dominant positive albedo feedback.
It is a small element of understanding which means we need to seriously trying to understand the complexity , instead of pretending it is all just “noise” and the entire future of the planet is a linear relationship to one variable : CO2.
Why display a quadratic fit in Fig. 1? Were research using quadratic models based on some physical theory? Or, did you use it just to get some drama? Compare with:
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2023/10/monthly_ice_09_NH_v3.0-1.png
The flattest 17-year trend (~zero) in the whole record is the last 17 years (2007-2023).
So? Kinda looks like a case of cherry-picking and ignorance of internal oscillations. I suppose you think going down a set of stairs doesn’t lose elevation because the step you are standing on is flat?
It’s the longest flattest step in the whole set of stairs, at the highest CO2, both emissions and atmospheric concentration.
When you are falling downstairs, there is ZERO possibility that you stop falling for 17 steps.
This clearly shows that there is far more to this than run-away melting caused by the albedo feedback, that we have past a tipping point and that there will soon be no ice at all. That is the general public perception because of deceptive “science” and media activists who think they have to lie in order to “save the planet”.
The 17y net change formally disproves the notion that a positive feedback is the dominant factor in ice cover. Now we need to the politics and start doing some REAL scientific work to understand the climate.
Climategrog,
“When you are falling downstairs, there is ZERO possibility that you stop falling for 17 steps.”
Gee, I was under the impression that the stairs were 17 years wide, not one. And that those multidecadal steps are more like the ripples that are built into some children’s slides – you slow down and speed up, but you keep going down.
You may be correct that the stairs are 17y wide. The data is too short to be conclusive about that. But that is NOT what IPCC / Al Gore and the climate hysterics were claiming in 2007. They are seeing an accelerating decline and claiming this was “run away melting” and the “death spiral” of arctic sea ice.
That hypothesis ( regarded as established scientific fact by the majority of society ) can now be formally dismissed. It is no longer consistent with the available data.
I we want to talk in “steps” we have one downward step and the flat part of a second with zero net change. That is way too short to even suggest there is a second step , let alone start the usual absurdly unscientific extrapolation outside the available data. You would not attempt that in physics.
ganon1950 speaks of “jumping the attractor”. This is utterly speculative, since he has absolutely no idea of the extent of the attractor itself.
Typical presumption; You have no idea of what I have an idea about. My idea is around 650 ppmv and (delayed) when the is no significant ice left.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.1216073110#
LOL—U R so funny. What an alarmist.
Thank you, Rob. I always figure deniers use “alarmist” as a perceived insult for people that understand the basic physical science of the GHE, AGW, and ACC. I’m good with that.
That paper notes “correlation” of CO2 and SST but wilfully ignores the fact that CO2 change FOLLOWS temperature change . It is a result not the cause of that change. Typical deceitful misrepresentation of the geological evidence which has been past off a science for decades now. That is why people like you are fooled into thinking CO2 is some kind of control knob and go full alarmist mode.
Climategrog,
“… but willfully ignores the fact that CO2 change FOLLOWS temperature change”.
You left out “sometimes”; it is a fact that most glacial – interglacial transitions are usually triggered by a temperature (insolation) change. It is not a “fact” for the slow carbon cycle, where volcanic/tectonic activity increases CO2 over millennia and temperature follows. Then, temperature itself, increased precipitation, and increased acidification of the precipitation (both carbonic and sulfuric), cause an increase in removal of CO2 by weathering of silicate rocks, and then the temperature goes back down to start the cycle over again.
What we are doing now is rapidly transferring slow cycle carbon into the fast carbon cycle, without (yet) any method to commensurately speed up the removal.
Sorry, but I am both a scientist and a physicist; I require an underlying physical hypothesis, that is tested many times by independent investigations, before it becomes accepted as “fact”. I do not accept mathematical analysis, without an underlying hypothesis of physical causality.
” It [CO2 lagging temps] is not a “fact” for the slow carbon cycle, where volcanic/tectonic activity increases CO2 over millennia and temperature follows. ”
A hand waving hypothesis is of no value until backed up by data. This is the problem with the claim that albedo feedback is driving runaway arctic melting.
In what period do we see CO2 leading temperature change suggesting CO2 causality? Is this process slower than the Milancovitch cycles you appear to be refering to in terms of insolation?
climategrog,
“… but willfully ignores the fact that CO2 change FOLLOWS temperature change”.
“A hand waving hypothesis is of no value until backed up by data.”
I do not make a handwaving hypothesis – it is based on physical understanding and extensive paleoclimatic studies of the slow carbon cycle.
You, however, make a blank statement of “fact” without even so much as a hand waving argument. Either for the paleoclimate changes with oscillations of the slow carbon cycle nor the Anthropocene.
You claim ” a deep understanding” but are unable to answer the question I asked: In what period do we see CO2 leading temperature change suggesting CO2 causality?
There has been a lot of work in the last decade attempting to rewrite the entire geological record in an attempt to make CO2 the magic single variable which drives the climate syste. The control knob.
They have still been unable to produce scientific evidence for the naming of a new epoch. If you use the word Anthropocene, you just reveal your unscientific attitude to the question.
So I ask again: In what period do we see CO2 leading temperature change suggesting CO2 causality?
Climategrog,
Now, and anytime in the past that the climate was in either “greenhouse” or “hothouse” state, and where climate change is driven by the slow carbon cycle.
“There has been a lot of work in the last decade attempting to rewrite the entire geological record in an attempt to make CO2 the magic single variable which drives the climate syste[m].”
Skeptical science posted today (10.30.2023) an article on the melting of the West Antarctica Ice Sheet. Blamed the melting on GW with a two sentences mentioning the warming seas with the implication the warming seas were due to GW. Yet no mention of the geothermal activity underneath west Antarctica
Perhaps they feel the added CO2 in the atmosphere made the magma get closer to the surface
Did the geothermal activity change?
John,
For reference, global average geothermal heat flux is 86 mW/M^2, while under the central WAIS it averages about 110 mW/M^2.
https://tc.copernicus.org/articles/14/4021/2020/#
In comparison, the heat flux at an ice – water interface ranges from about 2 – 20 W/M^2 depending on temperature differential and circulation.
The Marie Byrd mantle bubble has been in existence for 50-100 Ma, and:
“Although the heat source isn’t a new or increasing threat to the West Antarctic ice sheet, it may help explain why the ice sheet collapsed rapidly in an earlier era of rapid climate change, and why it is so unstable today.” per NASA
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2649/hot-news-from-the-antarctic-underground/
I don’t think there have been any big changes, but it certainly can
contribute to ice sheet instability in conjunction with other warming phenomena. I don’t think it is a straw that will discredit AGW, as much as some would like it to be.
Oops, for the forgot the reference for water – ice interface heat flux: “Dynamics of water temperature and interfacial heat flux in lake ice and under-ice layers”, in https://iwaponline.com/hr/issue/54/7
note it is for fresh water, but should still be similar for sea water – shelf ice.
John
Thwaites Glacier sits at the epicenter of geothermal activity. This paper and numerous others discuss the multiple factors impacting the Doomsday glacier. Dozens of studies have said the effects of geothermal activity should be included in models. A person has to be brainwashed to think CO2 is the only factor involved. Not everything started with AGW.
“ Our results suggest that sustained pulses of rapid retreat have occurred at Thwaites Glacier in the past two centuries”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-022-01019-9
Of course, not everything started with AGW – the Marie Byrd mantle bubble has been there for at least 50 million years and retreat and advance cycles of Thwaites have probably occurred as long as it has been there. But, a person has to be brainwashed to think CO2 is not involved in GW, whether it is caused by LIPs or FF burning.
” But, a person has to be brainwashed to think CO2 is not involved in GW”.
So now you flip from AGW to GW but for most people they are assumed to be the same thing.
So who does not think CO2 is a GHG , that is not controversial. CO2 is a minor player, it is not the control know we are being told it is which necessitates turning the world economy upside down and inside out on the basic of a fake “climate crisis” .
Our planet Earth is in millennials long continuous orbital forced warming pattern.
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When in warming pattern, a planet accumulates more solar energy than planet is capable to emit.
In planet’s effort to emit that excessive solar energy so to establishing the radiative energy equilibrium, the planet average surface temperature rises.
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When the planetary temperature becomes higher, then, according to the Stefan-Boltzmann emission law, the planet surface becomes capable of emitting IR (infrared radiation) more intensively.
Thus the mechanism of getting rid of energy does establish a close to the planet surface radiative equilibrium energy in /energy out state.
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The planet surface temperatures from Equator to Poles are very much differenciated.
Here it is when the nonlinearity of the Stefan-Boltzmann’s emission law gets in action!
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The Polar zone’s temperature rises faster, than the equatorial, or the average planet surface mean.
It is the phenomenon of Polar Temperatures Amplification.
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Due to the Stefan-Boltzmann emission law nonlinearity, the Polar areas (in order to get rid of the excessive incoming solar energy)…
The Polar areas surface temperatures rise faster – and it is observed in the melting of the ice sheet sea cover.
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https://www.cristos-vournas.com
Except, as we have already discussed, Earth is NOT “in millennials long continuous orbital forced warming pattern”. The CHANGE in solar forcing due to Milankovitch cycles is currently in a cooling phase. Both dI(e)/dt and dI(o)/dt are near (local) negative maxima and dI(p)/dt is near zero at a minimum of I(p) of low amplitude, because of I(e) at a minimum in its 400 ka component. [e = eccentricity, o = obliquity, p = precession].
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/milankovitch-cycle (figure 4.2)
This is also seen in the temperature data (also already discussed) for millennia prior to the industrial age.
Further, the nonlinearity of the Stefan-Boltzmann law (T^4) means that with (linear) temperature increase, the emission increases (cools) much faster. The reverse is true for cooling temperature. This is the principal negative feedback that keeps us in the “sweet spot”, where the “set point” is determined by other forcings (e.g., GHG radiative capture).
ganon1950,
“The CHANGE in solar forcing due to Milankovitch cycles is currently in a cooling phase. ”
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I was reffering not to Milankovitch cycle, but to the REVERSED Milankovitch cycle.
Milankovitch calculated everything perfectly. Only Milankovitch did his calculations for the 65 degrees North.
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When we REVERSE the CYCLE to the South, the cycle shows a culmination of the warming phase.
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“Further, the nonlinearity of the Stefan-Boltzmann law (T^4) means that with (linear) temperature increase, the emission increases (cools) much faster. ”
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And here it is when comes the Polar Temperatures AMPLIFICATION phenomenon!
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https://www.cristos-vournas.com
(1) Unfortunately, you did not specify that, and this thread was about Arctic sea ice extent.
(2) The effects are more pronounced in the Arctic than the Antarctic because of land mass (and winter snow cover distribution) and thus globally we are still in a cooling phase. The Vostok temperature data (dO18) shows that:
https://www.nature.com/articles/20859
(3) What I said about radiative cooling (Stefan-Boltzmann emissions) being negative feedback still holds, no matter where you apply it (at the equator also). If warming, emission increases faster than T minimizing the warming.
Polar temperatures increase faster than equatorial because of ocean current heat transfer and positive albedo feedback. The S-B nonlinear feedback works to slow/minimize these effects, not increase them.
ganon1950,
“Polar temperatures increase faster than equatorial because of ocean current heat transfer and positive albedo feedback. The S-B nonlinear feedback works to slow/minimize these effects, not increase them.”
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Yes, exactly.
And, as a result of the Polar Temperature Amplification Phenomenon, the planet average surface temperature appears to rise faster, than it otherwise would be rising on a “flat earth” planet.
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https://www.cristos-vournas.com
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What is exactly wrong with higher CO2 levels and a warmer climate if in fact those are the longer term trends. These two factors can only lead to higher plant growth rates all over the globe and will lead to more forest health as well as improving agriculture. If anything, more CO2 may well be a result of higher growth rates in all green plants whether on land or in marine and aquatic environments as they all respire in the dark, release CO2 and consume oxygen. To arbitrarily attemp to reduce CO2 levels on a grand scale most likely will backfire. Perhaps the “climate crisis” groups would like to indemnify farmers and forestry industries and others for any damage they cause to our ecosystems as a result of their shortsighted thinking.