Arctic Ice

[Mondy]

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/...70864-2,00.html

You should, of course, read the date of said article.

[Mondy]

Matched 2004,5 and 6 and just about there with 2002,3

Guess this'll be the last time this chart is used in the media - it was being churned out willy-nilly as the doom-mongers watched the red line plummet - what you make of it now?

[Gray-Wolf]

I would make it the the Arctic basin is now pretty full and so any further 'ice growth' will be to to fill in the spaces. In effect 'ice growth' will settle in line with the other lines (or there-abouts) for the rest of the season. If we do have another 'cooler' season than of late you would tend to expect the ice 'extent' expanding beyond Svalbard towards Iceland and further out into the Bering sea than of late.

Can we not yet understand that with more open water to freeze there will be 'anomalies' when we go comparing rates with times of less open water or is that just me?????

[laserguy]

Can we not yet understand that with more open water to freeze there will be 'anomalies' when we go comparing rates with times of less open water or is that just me?????

It's just you,GW . Ice extent is ice extent is ice extent!

[laserguy]

Matched 2004,5 and 6 and just about there with 2002,3

Guess this'll be the last time this chart is used in the media - it was being churned out willy-nilly as the doom-mongers watched the red line plummet - what you make of it now?

What'll happen is the chart will be turned upside down and the red line will be depicted as the proximity to an ice-free Arctic and impending world annihilation if we don't get heavy with those standby buttons etc. Joe Bloggs won't know any better.

[Iceberg]

Let me get this straight we have the second lowest ice extent (albeit just) for the 22nd of October with only 2007 having it lower and that means that all it great.....

BTW 2005 = 8023125

2008 = 8017969

We are 9 days behind 2007 the lowest year on record.

Again I am unsure of the point you are making.

I've had a thought maybe your saying that Arctic Ice increases as the Autumn goes on. Yes I'd agree with that.

[Mondy]

I would make it the the Arctic basin is now pretty full and so any further 'ice growth' will be to to fill in the spaces. In effect 'ice growth' will settle in line with the other lines (or there-abouts) for the rest of the season. If we do have another 'cooler' season than of late you would tend to expect the ice 'extent' expanding beyond Svalbard towards Iceland and further out into the Bering sea than of late.

Can we not yet understand that with more open water to freeze there will be 'anomalies' when we go comparing rates with times of less open water or is that just me?????

Oh I understand alright

I just find it quite laughable that the doom people were using this chart a few months ago as the ice fell rapidly to get their point cross. Now the boot is on the other foot, with a rampant ice increase, still the alarmists go on about "anomalies" et al. Facts are facts, the ice increase is overwhelming and you have egg on your face, LOL

We are 9 days behind 2007 the lowest year on record.

What's this "we" you alarmists use all time? I can assure you, I'm not part of any agw group, so keep me out of that, please!

Edited October 23, 2008 by Delta X-Ray

[J10]

Let me get this straight we have the second lowest ice extent (albeit just) for the 22nd of October with only 2007 having it lower and that means that all it great.....

BTW 2005 = 8023125

2008 = 8017969

We are 9 days behind 2007 the lowest year on record.

Again I am unsure of the point you are making.

I've had a thought maybe your saying that Arctic Ice increases as the Autumn goes on. Yes I'd agree with that.

I think you are using the wrong figures, the ice extent on the 22nd October 2008 is 8087969, which is now above the extent on the same date in 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007, and only behind the figures in 2003. We also remain over 1.4sqkm2 above the figures on the same day last year.

However there is a very big cluster between the year 2004/5/6/8, and it seems likely that the 2008 figures will oscillate between these and perhaps also the figures in 2003, which saw smaller rises over the next couple of weeks.

Considering how low the figures were at their bottom, the has been a very good increase this year and this surely is to be welcomed, as hopefully the ice will be in a better position to start next year thaw.

[Nick L]

It's almost as if some on here are disappointed with the fact that the red line is rising rapidly. The ice increase has to start somewhere if we want a recovery surely? It won't happen overnight.

[Iceberg]

That will be those figures that change then (bang head on wall).

I think we would be quite happy to see a recover in the ice, but as last winter showed it doesn't mean a great deal what happens in October.

[laserguy]

It's almost as if some on here are disappointed with the fact that the red line is rising rapidly. The ice increase has to start somewhere if we want a recovery surely? It won't happen overnight.

Careful,Nick. That's drifting uncomfortably close to the truth,my impression being that any signs of recovery,tentative or otherwise must be played down at all costs rather than being welcomed as the good news that it is. Isn't this a sign of what's going on inside the 'AGW mind'?

[Mondy]

It's almost as if some on here are disappointed with the fact that the red line is rising rapidly.

Couldn't have put it better..so true.

It's almost hard to credit people still believe all this warming/doom/agw/end-of-the-world et al hype, and still post "alarmist" material. It's like one of those American cults (Gore's followers perhaps) that never quite got off the ground, but they'll try their best to thwart facts, and the fact is Earth is cooling and you can't do anything about it except bang on about CO2, ghg's, rapid sea ice melt, broken up ice-shelves in Antarctica, misplaced/dying penguins, NW Passage open and so many, many more nonsensical (yet comical) woes.

[Roger J Smith]

I would be looking for ice to make a very aggressive return around Greenland (both sides) in this set-up, the arctic air seems to have hit the ground running in October and is pushing the jet south in so many different sectors next 3-5 days that the result is rapid buckling to meridional pattern, something we haven't seen much in the past few years really.

It seems to me there is more resistance to cold advection over the eastern Pacific this time, which may increase the chances for ice to recover more rapidly in the sector from Greenland to the Kara Sea. If these trends were to maintain their momentum into mid-winter, then it will really be game on.

[osmposm]

QUOTE

We are 9 days behind 2007 the lowest year on record.

What's this "we" you alarmists use all time? I can assure you, I'm not part of any agw group, so keep me out of that, please!

It's really not such an unusual turn of phrase, DXR, and I'm sure not intended to suck you, by implication, into our delusion. It's like someone saying "we now have an unprecedented level of personal debt in the UK": I myself don't have any personal debt, but to object to the phrase on the basis that I personally don't have a debt problem would be a bit silly. It is, of course, "we" as in the population of the planet, whose future many of us - rightly or wrongly - still worry about in a world that we fear - rightly or wrongly - is still essentially warming. If it upsets you that much, I'm sure 'we' (as in those of us whose opinions you so enjoy mocking and deriding) will limit ourselves in future to talking about the planet's physical condition in the third person singular.

Ossie

[Mondy]

into our delusion

into "our" delusion, surely?!

Btw, my earlier post atop this page omitted sea level rise along with other sillies mentioned by the warming gang :o

[osmposm]

QUOTE

It's almost as if some on here are disappointed with the fact that the red line is rising rapidly.

Careful,Nick. That's drifting uncomfortably close to the truth,my impression being that any signs of recovery,tentative or otherwise must be played down at all costs rather than being welcomed as the good news that it is. Isn't this a sign of what's going on inside the 'AGW mind'?

But why on earth would we do that? The vast majority of us who still believe the problem exists have nothing whatsoever to gain from supporting the orthodoxy, and nothing whatsoever to fear if it should turn out to be wrong. I repeat a question I have asked several times on here: is it really so difficult for you - laserguy, delta XR, nick and the rest - to accept that whether or not we are right, most people with the 'AGW mind' - expert and not - hold our opinions honestly and disinterestedly? That we are not all half-witted, blind, biased, corrupt, etc etc? And that we are in many cases so passionate about it because we hold genuine and deep fears for the future of the planet and our lives on it?

Ossie

[Roger J Smith]

Reading these exchanges I sometimes think there's a danger (on both sides) of assuming there are only two possible outcomes and that one will prove the other side wrong.

Those two outcomes seem to be either:

** continued warming leads to melting of arctic ice, sea level rises, our fears were justified

** soon it turns a lot colder and AGW is shown to be a groundless fear or delusion

Actually, there are all sorts of other outcomes that would have different impacts on the politics of climate change.

For example, it could just keep on varying around normal for 10-20 years, teasing both sides and keeping them in roughly the same relative position to one another, especially if this variation around normal included a slight upward drift.

Or, it could cool off rather suddenly for 2-3 years and then warm up again in 4-6 years, something like that would encourage even more polarized positions by the time it was all done because both sides would have seen "validation" of their point of view.

Or, there could be development of the theory among its proponents to include predictive capabilities that would show longer trends and more complex regional variability features, changing the debate to whether or not these longer trends were actually verifying and actually related to the theory.

The least "sexy" of these options is the long period of variability around long-term normal. That would require 40-60 years of constant repetition before I think perhaps the AGW side of the argument would erode into obscurity rather than oblivion, no one particular "end point" for the theory, just a slow death like the fate of the Biblical flood in science, widely believed in one century, widely ignored in another, nothing in particular to cause that change so much as a death by a thousand cuts (not that I'm saying the Biblical flood didn't happen in some form, but not as the world-wide deluge that would have to be accepted in the foundation for any form of science).

A sharp cooling trend now to 2010 followed by a decade of colder than normal weather would probably kill of the AGW theory in a series of fatal defections, this is fairly obvious, the theory can't sustain such a development from any cause except some catastrophic external event like a huge volcanic eruption and then it becomes moot in any case.

[J10]

Just a reminder here to be tolerant and respectful of others views.

On the one hand, it is clear that the 2007 ice extent was the lowest ever recorded, and the 2008 figure was the second lowest ever recorded at around 400,000sqkm2 above that level. Which of course is worrying.

However we are seeing a much more rapid refreeze this year than last year, and are now around 1.4m sqkm2 above that figure and just above the ice extent for the previous 5 years, which is good news.

it could be argued, that the thin ice of last year, which only froze slowly was more susceptible to thawing even despite a less mild summer.

So this years first year ice may well be thicker than last years, even if the maximum ice extent turns out to be around the average.

2 Predictions have turned out to be wrong, there were some last year who predicted that due to the slow re freeze and the lack of multi year ice, that the ice extent in 2008 would be lower than 2007, this was wrong.

Also though, there were those in the early part of summer 2008, who said that ice ice extent would be well above 2007, this was also wrong.

So there have been inaccurate comments on both sides of the argument, and while rigorous debate is encouraged, personal comments are not allowed, and petty point scoring does little for the atmosphere of the debate.

Please will all contributors consider this when making any further comments.

[Thundery wintry showers]

But why on earth would we do that? The vast majority of us who still believe the problem exists have nothing whatsoever to gain from supporting the orthodoxy, and nothing whatsoever to fear if it should turn out to be wrong. I repeat a question I have asked several times on here: is it really so difficult for you - laserguy, delta XR, nick and the rest - to accept that whether or not we are right, most people with the 'AGW mind' - expert and not - hold our opinions honestly and disinterestedly? That we are not all half-witted, blind, biased, corrupt, etc etc? And that we are in many cases so passionate about it because we hold genuine and deep fears for the future of the planet and our lives on it?

Ossie

An excellent post. Certainly from a personal point of view, I would love the IPCC etc. to be overestimating the human influence on climate, with no more than 1C of "anthropogenic" warming over the next century- then perhaps we'd have more time on our side to slowly reduce fossil fuel dependency without it being too slow to avert disaster. Plus, we'd see less decline of snowy winters! But it's important not to delude myself with hopecasting.

As for the ice recovery, there's good and bad news. The good news is that the recovery is nothing short of remarkable, considering how low the ice extent got- there is some hope, perhaps, that ice extent might not start free-falling towards zero. The bad news is that despite a La Nina year we still had the second lowest summer minimum on record.

A rapid recovery in ice extent doesn't prove anything with regards AGW, all it proves is that the ice has undergone rapid recovery. For starters, ice extent is not, in itself, a measure of global climate change- only Arctic climate change, which doesn't always follow the global trend.

[osmposm]

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/...70864-2,00.html

You should, of course, read the date of said article.

...and you should, of course, do some easy internet research to see what this story is actually talking about, and what - if anything - it signifies.

(1) The story is about the SS Narscopie meeting the schooner Akluvik while both were getting through a small part - Bellot Strait - of one of the several variations of the more southerly shallow water NW Passage in Sept 1937. Here is a map I've scribbled some coloured bits on to clarify (I hope!):

The Narscopie was heading west, the Akluvik east. The Bellot Strait is ringed in orange. There is nothing in the story to say whether or not the Narscopie continued on to complete the whole passage west (the purple line/arrow)- I've not found anything elsewhere to suggest that she did, and I suspect she was too big to get through the rest of it. The reason for the excitement of the story was that getting through even Bellot Strait was amazing in those icier times. If she did, however, it would not be so extraordinary because...

(2) The Narscopie was an ice-breaker!!!! Here is some decription from Wikipedia: "The Nascopie was fitted with an ice breaker bow and her plates were of five-eights inch steel...........Soon after World War I had broken out the Russians was in dire need of ships with ice breaking capacity, and they placed orders with British shipyards and at the same time began a campaign of purchasing icebreakers on the open market........They then began negotiations with A. J. Harvey and Co. for the purchase of Bellaventure, Bonaventure and Adventure and with Job Brothers for Beothic and Nascopie." Here is a picture of Narscopie and her sister-ship Beothic ploughing through ice:

(3) The trip of the Akluvik is perhaps more interesting because it did more of the passage. However, it had started only in Cambridge Bay (ringed in blue), and the little schooner picked its way - like Amundsen's Gjoa a generation before - through little, temporary gaps in the ice, via Gjoa Haven (ringed in yellow) up to and through Bellot Strait (orange). And as the following description makes clear, it did so by sheer luck and skilled seamanship, and went very little further, returning through the strait the next day:

"The trip of the Akluvik required a great deal of preparation at its home port of Cambridge Bay. The crew had to be prepared, for example, to spend the winter away from home if caught in the ice. The big drop of trading goods on this trip in late 1937 was to be at Gjoa Haven on King William Island, and then the target was to transit the Northwest Passage - Bellot Strait, on this occasion - by 1 September, before freeze-up.

After the stop at Gjoa Haven, the Akluvik headed up along Boothia Peninsula. Once it reached Bellot Strait, Gall remembers that “the ice was piled up on the reefs and along the shore, and the current was running pretty fast.” At that point he saw an opening and “went for it!” The easterly run through the strait was successful, and the night was spent on the northeast end of the strait, at a location then known as Kennedy Harbour. They returned west through the Bellot Strait the following day, 2 September. Gall admits a certain amount of luck was involved, because their success depended largely on the nature of the ice and the accuracy of their dead reckoning. Nevertheless, the trip remains quite a tribute to their daring.

Several times the Aklavik was in danger of being nipped by the ice, but the most exciting moment of the trip was at the western entrance to Bellot Strait when the engine failed. A swift current flowed, and disaster threatened as the little vessel was swept towards the rocky shore. I the nick of time a faulty part of the engine was replaced but the rest of the trip had to be made at half speed, with mechanical improvisation due to stripped gears. The ship which they met after leaving Bellot Strait was the 2500 ton Nascopie; the Aklavik was a 30 ton schooner."

So, the Akluvik didn't traverse the whole passage either, even by the southerly route - though she was certainly small enough for the shallow depths there.

(4) But even if the ice-breaking Narcopie, or the little Aklavic - or both of them - had completed the whole passage, the significance would be little compared with conditions now. Because what they were picking or breaking their way through part of was, I repeat, the (shallow) southerly route. What opened this year and last for the first recorded time was the deep water Northerly Passage (see the green line/arrow on the map above). As a result there is a strong possibility that in the years ahead ordinary, large merchant ships - with no special protection, and no extraordinary seaman skills - will be able to sail the NW passage on a regular basis. As far as we know - oops, sorry, you don't like the 'we' do you?! - this has NEVER happened before. Arctic Ice conditions in the 1930s/40s were not comparable with today, or we would have read about it.

If you have any evidence to the contrary that stands up to the most cursory investigation, I really want to hear it, DXR. I so, so wish I am wrong and you are right.

Ossie

Edited October 24, 2008 by osmposm

[Gray-Wolf]

I still feel it prudent not to be 'hasty' in calling a reversal to the fortunes up north. If ,as appears, we have a 'new synoptic' up there (cobbled around the old impacts of the pdo/nao but influenced by the northerly migrating Jet) then we are beyond our experience.

The impact of increased storminess in the region, as witnessed over the past 50yrs (through both 'cold' and 'warm phases'), will impact on ice formation and we have seen how devastating to summer ice the novel winds/warm ocean incursions are. As noted on a number of occasions, both here and Antarctic thread, it isn't so much about how much ice forms but rather about how much ice is lost during spring/summer/autumn.

In the north it is the loss of perennial ice (esp. that over 5 yrs), ice shelfs and Mass reduction of the Greenland ice Dome, to the south it is the loss of the protective shelf system and resultant draining of ice sheets. None of this occurs in winter (until Wilkins came unstuck that is!!!).

I will wager that by December we are not seeing 'fantastic' anythings in both growth rates and extent.....it'll be much of a muchness with all the rest.

DXR , August 2008 melt rates, how would you describe them?

[BLAST FROM THE PAST]

Too much I care for the planet or I must do because I support/believe in AGW. One still can care for the planet you know! :lol:

BFTP

Edited October 24, 2008 by BLAST FROM THE PAST

[stewfox]

Couldn't have put it better..so true.

It's almost hard to credit people still believe all this warming/doom/agw/end-of-the-world et al hype, and still post "alarmist" material. It's like one of those American cults (Gore's followers perhaps) that never quite got off the ground, but they'll try their best to thwart facts, and the fact is Earth is cooling and you can't do anything about it except bang on about CO2, ghg's, rapid sea ice melt, broken up ice-shelves in Antarctica, misplaced/dying penguins, NW Passage open and so many, many more nonsensical (yet comical) woes.

Stop the press there is a melt underway in Antartica :lol:

[stewfox]

Too much I care for the planet or I must do because I support/believe in AGW. One still can care for the planet you know! :lol:

BFTP

This comes up time and time again on these threads ie just because you dont believe in AGW or the like you must want to bury the world in Plastic bags. Its not true

The 'red line' (Ill call it watergate) doesn't really mean much at present but its still 'interesting'. Its worthy of dicussion rather then 'ice freezes in October so what'.

[BLAST FROM THE PAST]

just because you dont believe in AGW or the like you must want to bury the world in Plastic bags. Its not true

Absolutely !

BFTP