Bishop Hill Icy news
Dec 12, 2011 Climate: Surface There have been a few interesting bits and pieces over the last few days on the subject of polar ice, which have left me rather confused, so this piece is by way of a call for assistance.
The story starts with Nigel Lawson taking some potshots at David Attenborough for his global warming episode of Frozen Planet. He made a number of specific criticisms of Attenborough.
Had he wished to be objective, he would have pointed out that, while satellite observations confirm that the extent of Arctic sea ice has been declining over the past 30 years, those satellite observations show that, overall, Antarctic sea ice has been expanding over the same period.
Had he wished to be objective, he would have pointed out that the polar bear population has not been falling, but rising.
Had he wished to be objective, he would have mentioned that recent research findings show that the increased evaporation from the Arctic Ocean, as a result of warming, will cause there to be more cloud cover, thus counteracting the adverse effect he is so concerned about.
Had he wished to be objective, he would have noted that, while there was indeed a modest increase in mean global temperature (of about half a degree Centigrade) during the last quarter of the 20th century, so far this century both the UK Met Office and the World Meteorological Office confirm that there has been no further global warming at all.
This exchange prompted a riposte from Mark Brandon, a scientific advisor to the programme, who sometimes comments at BH as Mark B. Followers of the climate twittersphere may have come across him as @icey_mark. The response was published on Mark's page at the Open University as well as prompting an article at the Guardian by Leo Hickman, curiously timed to coincide with the release of Booker's report last week.
The response was as follows:
There has been a net loss of over a million square kilometres of global sea ice extent since satellite records began
The mean volume of arctic sea ice has decreased by something around 50% since the start of the satellite record.Only this week a publication in Nature described the loss of Arctic sea as:
"The duration and magnitude of the current decline in sea ice seem to be unprecedented for the past 1,450 years"
The loss of a million sqkm of extent seems plausible to me - I look at the Cryosphere Today global sea ice area graph occasionally, and while this is currently at around zero, it has been around the minus 1-2 msqkm mark in recent years (about 4-5%). This seems to me to be a decidedly unscary kind of figure.
The Arctic volume figure is more interesting. My understanding (based admittedly on only a limited study of sea ice) is that estimates of sea ice volume are a relatively recent development. So my question is: how do we know that Arctic ice volume has declined by 50%? The intrigue is increased still further by a tweet Brandon made a couple of days later in response to Christopher Booker, who had also take a potshot at Attenborough in his column,: referring in the process to a "modest shrinkage of ice in the Arctic"
only Booker could say 30% decrease is "modest" RT @leohickman: Booker #FrozenPlanet
This raises the question of what this latter figure refers to. Is it volume or area or extent? And over what timeframe? And where does it come from? I haven't been able to get a response from Mark.
If we refer back to the last of Mark B's three points above, the suggestion that Arctic sea ice is at its lowest in 1450 years is also interesting. The paper he cites is none other than Kinnard et al, which is currently the subject of considerable interest at Climate Audit, where the paper's use of tree-ring proxies that are known to be problematic (e.g. Yamal) has raised eyebrows. Doug Keenan has also been interested in Mark's arguments, and has pointed us both to this paper by Willie Soon, which finds what appears to me to be an excellent match between Arctic temperatures and solar irradiance - this would presumably explain the fall in Arctic sea ice.
All this leaves my head somewhat in a spin though. What are the correct figures for the decline in Arctic and global sea ice area, extent and volume, and how good are they?)? And is the Soon paper a plausible explanation?
Reader Comments (126)
@ Jace, 1:05pm
'Adult male bears occasionally kill and eat polar bear cubs,[78] for reasons that are unclear.[79]'
This is common behaviour amongst most large terrestrial carnivores particularly big cats, but also bears. A new dominant adult male normally kills any existing offspring of any females he contacts, in order to eliminate any behavioural/hormonal bonds that may prevent her mating with him. Nothing to do with CAGW and has been an established fact for decades.
Discussion of polar ice seems to involve a lot of peas, thimbles, apples, oranges, and as much sleight of hand as you can squeeze out of a lemon of an argument.
From what I understand all agree that there is, in the last few decades, less sea ice in the Arctic, both in terms of volume and extent. In the Antarctic there is warming in the peninsular, but not due to global warming says Eric Stieg in a recent paper.
Another recent paper describes the East Antarctica is expanding by 1.43% per year, abstract at the Hockey Schtick, which seems a humongous amount over, say, 30 years. We don't know the volume of the ice in the Antarctic because it is so thick, it has not been measured and it is a continent not all sea ice.
So there is a lot we don't know, and a lot that cannot be compared one pole to another, but whatever we do know seems easily spun into any kind of narrative you like.
A slightly OT response to an earlier comment and link by John re Frozen Planet polar bear fakery - I remember the shot and did wonder how they got it, so thanks for linking to the explanation!
But the fact that it was done in a zoo and not in situ does not for one second make me think it was fake - this kind of set up is routine in natural history photography and film - there have even been books on the subject. It is all part of trying to tell the story.
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_stddev_timeseries.png
This is the link to the alarmist NSIDC.
The graph shows extent with at least 15% sea ice. Is there a similar graph which shows the extent with say 50 or 80 % sea ice?
Porrit witters on about thousands of scientists so he hasn't bothered to look at the Climategate emails?
Also I doubt Mr Porrit has bothered to read this extract:
NOVEMBER 1929. MONTHLY WEATHER REVIEW. 589
The oceanographic observations have, however, been
even more interesting. Ice conditions were exceptional.
In fact, so little ice as never before been noted. The
expedition all but established a record, sailing as far
north its 81 29' in ice-free water. This is the farthest
north ever reached with modern oceanographic apparatus.
The character of the waters of the great polar basin
has heretofore been practically unknown. Dr. Hoel reports
that he made a section of the Gulf Stream at 81 degrees
north latitude and took soundings to a depth of 3,100
meters. These show the Gulf Stream very warm, and it
could be traced as a surface current till beyond the 81st
parallel. The warmth of the waters makes it probable
that the favorable ice conditions will continue for some time.
Later a section was taken of the Gulf Stream off Bear
Island and off the Isfjord, as well as a section of the cold
current that comes down along the west coast of Spitzbergen
off the south ca e.
to note the unusually warm summer in Arctic Norway
and the observations of Capt. Martin Ingebrigtsen, who
has sailed the eastern Arctic for 54 years past. He says
that he first noted warmer conditions in 1915, that since
that time it has steadily gotten warmer, and that to-day
the Arctic of that region is not recognizable as the same
region of 1865 to 1917.
Many old landmarks are so changed as to be unrecognizable.
Where formerly great masses of ice were found
there are now often moraines, accumulations of earth etc etc......
http://www.climate4you.com/Text/1922%20SvalbardWarming%20MONTHLY%20WEATHER%20REVIEW%20.pdf
diogenes, Salopian
According to R. V. Jones in Most Secret War, it was Charles Kittel who insisted on going to sea in a minesweeper to check the accuracy of the crews' reports. I suppose we could settle the argument by asking Kittel himself. He is still going strong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Kittel
Jones also quotes Isaac Newton:
"If, instead of sending the observations of able seamen to able mathematicians on land, the land would send able mathematicians to sea, it would signify much more to the improvement of navigation and the safety of men's lives and estates on that element."
Foxgoose
Why am I being obtuse? The testimony from the submariner on the USS Skate is clear: the polar ice is "an average of 6 - 8 feet thick". They surfaced in a polynya which they located, while submerged, using sonar.
This in no way contradicts recent expeditions finding much larger areas of thin ice at the pole. That you suggest it does shows that the 'subs at the pole' sceptic meme is alive and well, despite not in any way demonstrating that there was 'thin' ice at the pole in 1958 and 1959.
And there you go again: the subs found polynyas, which are cracks in the thick ice. Which allowed them to surface either through thin ice or open water.
The interesting point raised here is Matt Ridley's argument that an ice-free Arctic ocean during the HTM doesn't seem to have destabilised methane hydrate depostits on the sea floor. If we can extrapolate from the HTM to projected conditions post-2050, this is a good argument against what would here be termed 'alarmism' about clathrates.
In 2000 my wife & I visited Axel Heiberg Island in the Canadian arctic. As part of the trip we were escorted to the Geodetic Forest ( I think that's the correct term ) there. This is an area where mummified ( i.e. not fossilised) trees are to be found. We have the photos & a sample which is definitely wood, not stone.
There were scientists camped there among the mosquitoes. They had just discovered animal remains & had ascertained from the tree rings that the trees had experienced alternating periods of light & dark. This proved that the trees had been present at those latitudes at some time in the past & that the island had not drifted from further south as in the case of Svalbard, which has some fossilised trees.
So the Arctic has been ice free some thousands of years ago.
The average of the long Kinnard arctic ice core series (black curve in below link) should be a good indication for sea ice in the last 2 millenia (though there is a divergence again in recent years).
Temperatures just recovered a bit from the 2000 years low about 200 years ago.
http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/compare_o18.png
BBD
"polynyas, which are cracks in the thick ice"
I think you may be confusing "leads" and "polynyas".
Dreadnought
You are correct. However, I followed the usage in the original quote:
What we'd have to decide here is whether it actually mattered even a tiny little bit.
Only AGW believers- and extremists at that- would seriously make the claim that evidence of open ice at the North Pole during winter and early spring during times prior to the alleged climate crisis is irrelevant.
A basic tenet of the Arctic ice as *proof* of the CO2 caused crisis is that prior to mankind's wickedness the icecap was a centuries old vast sheet.
Evidence from the US Navy that this is not so is only dismissed by believers because it is inconvenient.
Ignoring the photos, just like ignoring the multiple lines of evidence showing the Arctic basin to be even more ice free in the relatively recent past, is yet one of the many tells that many AGW believers are willfully lying about this.
Which raises the question of just what the AGW believers really want?
They obviously do not really want to control CO2, because not even one CO2 policy pushed by AGW works.
They are not persuadable, even by photographs.
So what is left? It ain't evidence based science, and it ain't results based policies.
"There you go again" may have worked for Ronald Reagan, BBD - but, paraphrasing another US election debate gem - "You're no Ronald Reagan".
I think you should give up on this one before you embarrass yourself further -
Polynyas are not "cracks in thick ice", they are areas of open water which can be several kilometers long.
It's quite clear that you didn't bother to look at the photograph we were discussing - which showed large areas of open water (in May) receding into the distance.
The point remains, that whenever the current crew like Serreze and the Caitlin clowns come across areas of thin or absent ice - it's always "proof" of impending AGW doom, and never normal wind driven ice movement.
You seem to be getting more and more doctrinaire about all this stuff - I think you've earned your spurs now and they should make you an official "climatologist".
@Dreadnought, Thanks for the clarification, no argument here. But actually the involvement of some scientists in WWII is rather resonant of the current CAGW disagreement. 'Prof' Lindemann/Lord Cherwell, was well known as a personal friend of Churchill and his scientific advisor, nothing 'scientific' got past him, unless he agreed with it and those proposing it. He clashed with Tizard and Reg Jones over the German use of radar to guide their bombing raids on British targets. He falsified his statistics regarding the 'dehousing programme' against Germany cities (despite evidence from Patrick Blackett), diverted centimetric radar to Bomber Command, rather than Coastal Command and he totally refuted that the V1 flying bomb and V2 rocket were viable, until they started dropping on London
BBD
I guess I will have accept it as another oddity of US Naval terminology, like calling 'funnels' 'smokestacks' and pronouncing 'buoy' as 'boo-ee'.
Perhaps this site: http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=8771666371746650057&postID=7860977154155196590&page=1&token=1322754483482 (sorry - I have no idea to do links) might give you a taste of the sort of person any rational debater in the climate change discussion (a.k.a. a "denialist") has to face.
I actually managed to get him to completely contradict himself - and he still could not see it! (Nor could he grasp the lifesavers a threw for him, either.)
In their hopelessly biased coverage of the Durban fiasco yesterday, the Canadian CBC, their equivalent to the BBC, urged viewers to look at its website to see their interactive graphic of 1968-2010 ice extent.
I wonder why they chose that period?
No mention of Antarctica of course.
One major source of relevant information about past Arctic climates is archaeology, and particularly the eastward expansion of the Inuit. For example:
McGhee, R. 2001. Ancient people of the Arctic. Canadian Museum of Civilization/UBC Press.
From Chapter 6, 'When the Climate Changes'
"The last Ice Age came to an end about 11,000 years ago. The climate of the Arctic suddenly warmed, soon reaching mean annual temperatures a few degrees warmer than today. The ice sheets... began to thaw and retreat, and the sea invaded channels freed from melting ice... The tree line advanced well to the north of its present position, and in more northerly regions the warm summers probably produced a relatively luxuriant tundra vegetation."
------------
It goes on to explain that then it "rapidly cooled" about 2000 B.C., rapidly warmed again to the Mediaeval Warm Period peak (1000 AD), then cooled (Little Ice Age), then warmed again.
Needless to say, the Inuit expanded eastward across the Arctic, using boats, during a warm phase.
Just popped over to WUWT and this is their latest post:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/12/more-ursus-bogus-this-time-with-fake-snow-on-bbcs-frozen-planet/
Poor BBC.
Foxgoose
How did I embarrass myself? I followed the usage in the quote when I should have said 'gap in the ice' rather than 'crack in the ice'. This is trivial. Which is why you are picking up on it even though it I acknowledged this to Dreadnought at Dec 12, 2011 at 7:34 PM. It's like a cat fluffing itself up to look bigger and more frightening than a scared cat actually is.
Here's what the crewmember from the USS Skate said, again:
Half a mile long and 200 yards wide. And quickly gone.
I'm not trying to argue that Arctic sea ice melt 1979 - present is unexceptional, normal, part of natural variability etc.
And I also know that comparing the ice-free Arctic of the Holocene Thermal Maximum with what is happening now is just daft. Not to mention deeply - but conveniently - misleading.
No, if anyone is embarrassing themselves here, it's not me.
" Nature described the loss of Arctic sea as:
"The duration and magnitude of the current decline in sea ice seem to be unprecedented for the past 1,450 years""
Who, in the year 561 AD, was capable of measuring the entire extent of Arctic ice?
More on USS Skate
http://www.navsource.org/archives/08/08578.htm
As I have said in the past, when the Arctic is ice free in February, wake me up and I'll promise to pretend to be bothered.
This interesting article appeared in the Register today. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/12/12/greenland_lurches_upward/
"In the Antarctic, data prior to the satellite record are even more sparse. To try to extend the historical record of Southern Hemisphere sea ice extent further back in time, scientists have been investigating two types of proxies for sea ice extent. One is records kept by Antarctic whalers since the 1930s that document the location of all whales caught. Because whales tend to congregate near the sea ice edge to feed, their locations could be a proxy for the ice extent. A second possible proxy is the presence of a phytoplankton-derived organic compound in Antarctic ice cores. Since phytoplankton grow most abundantly along the edges of the ice pack, the concentration of this sulfur-containing organic compound has been proposed as an indicator of how far the ice edge extended from the continent. Currently, however, only the satellite record is considered sufficiently reliable for studying Antarctic sea ice trends."
http://www.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/SeaIce/page2.php
Here is an interesting paper:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/10/18/1106378108.abstract
The Ward Hunt ice shelf north of Ellesmere Land has been disintegrating since the late 19th century in an unprecedented manner we are told. Now someono has actually looked into the matter and found it decidedly precedented. The ice shelf started forming about 4000 years ago, after the early Holocene climatic optimum, broke up about 1400 years ago at the beginning of the MWP, reformed at the end of the MWP about 800 years ago and is now once again breaking up.
Might be useful:
http://www.nfb.ca/film/How_to_Build_an_Igloo
NFB might be a place to look for past arctic conditions.
http://www.nfb.ca/film/passage-trailer
http://ve.torontopubliclibrary.ca/frozen_ocean/intro_nw_fox.htm
To Tom Mills, who says this:
"In 2000 my wife & I visited Axel Heiberg Island in the Canadian arctic. As part of the trip we were escorted to the Geodetic Forest ( I think that's the correct term ) there. This is an area where mummified ( i.e. not fossilised) trees are to be found. We have the photos & a sample which is definitely wood, not stone."
I first read about the mummified trees -- Dawn Redwoods, now find only in China -- in Natural History magazine in 1990. The date from when the earth was REALLY warm, around 45 million years ago. They were inundated in a huge flood of silt, which sealed them so perfectly that nothing could change the wood or even the leaves. When the silt finally blew away, revealing the trees, the naturalist who discoved them over 20 years ago was able to pick up 45 million year old leaves, and burn pieces of 45 million year old wood. Just amazing.
Now the word is getting around. Here is one link:
http://geology.about.com/od/fossilstimeevolution/a/aa_oldDNA.htm
And part of a paragraph from that link:
"The current champions in this field are the Eocene dawn-redwood forests of Axel Heiberg Island, in the Canadian Arctic. For about 45 million years the stumps, logs and foliage of these trees have been preserved almost totally unmineralized, thanks to swift burial in conditions that kept oxygen out. Today this fossil wood lies on the ground, ready to pick up and burn."
Based on observation?
http://ve.torontopubliclibrary.ca/frozen_ocean/intro_sept.htm
to TTY: great find, that PNAS paper showing that the Ward ice shelf disintegrated about 1400 years ago as the world warmed into the Medieval Warm Period. Then was recreated as the world got colder, getting ready to push the Vikings out of Greenland, about 800 years ago.
Not unprecedented. If some of today's warming is man made,which I think it is, and if the Arctic is getting marginally warmer than it would have been absent our emissions, it is good to know that the Arctic has seen all this before, in particular during the "Holocene Optimum" of 8,000 to 6,000 years ago, when it was decidedly warmer than it is now. And if we will postpone our slide into the next Ice Age by judicious use (and saving) of fossil fuels, then so much the better.
I would love for there to be an open channel year round in the Arctic Ocean. It would make it much easier to ship oil from Purdhoe Bay to the US east coast.
BBD,
The Emperor was not embarrassed either.
Dave Salt -
A belated thanks for your reference -- quite some time ago. I think that's exactly what I was looking for. Unfortunately, the site's images seem to be out of order at the moment.
Its worse than you think Bish, but then again, it always is!
Its already to late!
Thanks for that, Pete H. I love the line at the end about the author of this truly terrifying piece:
That's exactly the kind of group I would trust to tell me it's not an emergency.
Indeed, I'm sure Matt Ridley's invitation is in the post.
@ Roger Longstaff
" Didn't Attenborough also predict that the Arctic would be ice free in WINTER in 20 - 30 years time? Surely he meant to say summer, but why hasn't this been picked up? "
Steady on Roger, we are dealing with Auntie Beeb who, perish the thought, is always right, every time, without fail, without favour and, most of all, functions completelyin an impartial manner.
I need to lie down in a dark room!
Sorry guys....hit the GO button twice by mistake
[Dealt with it. BH]
Bishop Hill
The problem with Soon (2005) is the same with earlier iterations of his claimed correlation between Arctic surface air temperatures and TSI.
He is using an obsolete semi-empirical TSI reconstruction from Hoyt & Schatten (1993). Although Soon states that he is using an upublished update from Hoyt 2005 it appears to be little changed from the inaccurate original of 1993. Eight years of new data are added at the end of the reconstruction. Soon should be using Wang et al (2005) like everyone else. Very odd, given that Soon is an astrophysicist and presumably knows this.
Wang's reconstruction agrees well with the accurate 30-year satellite observational record of TSI variation. H&S (1993) substantially over-estimates TSI variation, which is why it has long been considered obsolete. But Soon can only get his 'strong correlation' if he uses H&S...
Another shoddy and deliberately misleading paper by WS.
John
Thanks for that interesting link. The scientists who were there in 2000 were Canadian. It is indeed a fascinating place. Also on a visit to Churchill, Manitoba our first sight of a polar bear was of a large male devouring a quite large cub which he had just killed.
BBD,
It takes a particularly ignorant hubris to make claims about the Arctic that not only ignore the history but pretend that 30 years is a climatologically sufficient period to make conclusions from.
But those sorts of studies are more than sufficient for the AGW faithful.
Soon (2005) was published in August 2005.
Wang (2005) was published in June 2005.
I used this source:
http://polesapart.com/files/4_bill_allan.pdf
which reaches the same conclusion as BBD. However, it seems harsh to chastise Soon for not taking notice of a paper published 3 months before his own.
hunter
You are being offensive in a content-free (and tedious) manner.
by coincidence, while driving home last night, an interesting chat came on Radio 3 about the first attempts to measure Antarctic ice:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01809np
David Drewry's Essay "Unveiling Antarctica" describes the extraordinary human feats undertaken to measure the depth of the Antarctic ice cap and what lies beneath it.
Working with the Americans under the newly ratified Antarctic Treaty, David pioneered the use of airborne radar to measure the fluctuating thickness of the ice sheets that cover the continent.
"What we did was to fly a radar transmitter in an aircraft, bouncing radio waves downwards through the ice. By measuring the time taken for their return we could calculate how thick the ice was. Because we sent thousands of radio pulses a second, we were able to build up a continuous profile of the ice sheet. And by flying regular tracks across the continent we began to construct a map of the land lying beneath the ice - unveiling the real geography of Antarctica".
The deeper the ice, however, the lower they had to fly to measure it. One sortie, accompanied by the infamously steely-nerved flight engineer -Bones- is graphically retold. They flew at 250 knots whilst the ice flashed by just 25 feet below.
David's work helped to reveal completely unexpected lakes of water deep under the ice. Even today it's not known what primeval creatures may lurk there.
diogenes
Thanks for the excellent link. Let's hope everyone here, beginning with hunter, reads it.
Soon knows exactly what he's doing. He's been at it for years. He didn't have to go all the way back to 1993 (in 2005!) for a TSI reconstruction. It was a deliberate choice. Furthermore, he most certainly had time to see Wang et al. (2005) before submitting - and he submitted anyway.
That's enough for me.
Soon (2005) was published in August 2005, Wang (2005) was published in June 2005.
(That's 2 months apart - not 3).
Can someone tell me how long it normally takes after submission of a paper before it is published? Of course, what I'm trying to estimate here is how long between publication of Wang (2005) and submission of Soon (2005).
BBD,
Pointing out the historical illiteracy that is so much a part of AGW is neither rude or content free.
You just don't like it.
Unless our Bishop chooses to dislike my pointing out one of the important ways AGW belief lowers the intelligence level of any discussion, I think I will continue as planned.
Would you like some brie with your whine, BBD?
BBD -
It seems you must have a pretty good idea how long it takes between submitting a paper for publication and it finally being published. How long does it normally take? Peer review and so forth, I mean.
The usual tactics I see:
- swarm in with irrelevancies and abuse
- use the distraction to side-step the serious issue
Which in this case is that Soon (2005) is wrong.
I'm sorry, BBD.
This time it is you who have been abusing Soon, saying that he most certainly had time to see Wang et al. (2005) before submitting - and he submitted anyway.
the question of whether the paper was correct or not is an ebntirely different issue. Scientists often submit papers which are subsequently shown to be incorrect. That is to be expected.
In this case, either your statement about timeing is correct, and we draw one conclusion, or you may have been mistaken, and we draw a different conclusion. Now which is it?
matthu
No more irrelevancies now.
Here is the comparison of TSI reconstructions from IPCC TAR. Hoyt & Schatten is the black curve.
Note:
- far higher values for TSI in W/m2 than other reconstructions
- much greater variability than other reconstructions
H&S is not in good agreement with other constructions. But it is the one Soon chose to use in 2005. He did so on purpose, and the purpose was to mislead. Or perhaps there is a better explanation? Maybe it's an elaborate practical joke and nobody's realised yet.