North pole to melt this year?

johnny,

the problem is that you have not given us a foundation at all. you just keep talking about your personal opinion based upon your personal experience. the trouble with that is that it leaves ethics in the crapper with whatever anyone thinks. hitler's ethics become every bit as legitimate as yours.......not in your mind, but in his and anyone who agrees with him, which was a large part of Germany 70 years ago.

revelation-based ethics at least have a legitimate claim to universality to all who believe in a god and since that is by far most of humanity it gets us a long ways down the road.

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oh...to get back to the topic of the thread, we are in the last 2 to 4 weeks of arctic melt for the year and we have seen another fairly respectable recovery over last year. this is going to no doubt leave this year as #3 lowest extent (2007 was the lowest, then 2008 and now 2009) and 3 years is hardly a respectable trend, but then again there is speculation that we just ended 30 years of negative AMO and PDO and we should start seeing a recovery. IF that is true, then we are seeing what we would expect.

so this year looks like it should end up about 300,000 to 500,000 square kilometers above last years' minimum which ended about 400,000 above 2007's record minimum. interesting considering this thread started with dire warnings of an ice free arctic just around the corner.

needless to say, it could still come and the past 2 years could just be a small road bump on the way to complete melting, but at least for another year disaster has been averted.

arctic ice graph

the interesting thing is that this year is ending fairly close to 2005's minimum so it will be interesting to see what this next year will bring with talk of a cold fall and winter in the northern hemisphere.
 
for the record, i also think that the original article was indeed trying to claim that the arctic would possibly melt completely. yes they kept saying "north pole" but the rest of the article makes it very clear they are talking about the entire arctic sea and the entire ice cap.

i just remember that at one point some on here were trying to claim that the article was only claiming that the pole itself would meld and not the entire ocean, but reading the article carefully it is difficult to support that claim without playing semantic games.

at any rate, they were wrong 18 months ago and after 2 more summers we are even further from this happening.
 
Thanks MOP, it is indeed good news that ice thickness is greater in some regions of the Arctic than expected.

I also appreciate the link to the Aldred Wegener Institute for Polar & Marine Research - I'm happy that you have a reource other than Anthony Watts (Chief Weatherman at KPAY AM Radio in Chico, California).

The Alfred Wegener Institute has other studies that are, unfortunately, not so optimistic - The Link

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nope, i didn't know that. i am guessing your cv is not as impressive as Watts, particularly when it comes to discussing climate change. of course, he rarely does that as most of the posts he provides are merely links to articles or guest posts from others.

but once again, the study you appreciated which suggests that the ice is thickening was linked by Watts on his blog. aren't you glad he provided such a great service?

oh...and 2009 has diverged sharply from 2008. it is looking like 2009 will make an even more dramatic recovery over 2008 than 2008 did over 2007. of course, there are still about 3 weeks of melt left depending on when the minimum falls, but it is clear now that 2009 will not catch 2008.
 
oh...and for the record Bierce, here is a study from April of this year which agrees with me that the Antarctic ice is indeed growing:

antarctic ice is growing

it is from the AGW camp and claims that it is only growing temporarily due to pollution but will start shrinking within the decade. regardless of if the latter is true, it shows that even AGW supporters are willing to admit that the Antarctic is indeed growing...
 
Who's playing semantic games here, mop, when you are the one who suggests ambiguity in the term "North Pole" (which was stated to be "just another point on the globe") and completely ignore the paragraph in which the source stated the prediction for total Arctic meltout was 2030 with some people thinking it "might" be sooner. There it was, a direct statement of a year for predicted total Arctic melt, with a single caveat of some people thinking it might be sooner, and you try to say the article was a prediction for a ice-free Arctic in 2008?

You, sir, prove yourself to be no one to trust with an interpretation of the words of another.

And once again, when it comes to Antarctic ice, you completely miss the point, which was that you were erroneously presenting sea ice data to represent total ice data for the Antarctic. You cite to two articles, and in doing so, you commit the same rhetorical crime a third time. You just can't stop misrepresenting things, can you?

In the first article, it says

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bierce, i must admit your tone is hard to figure out. we are just having a discussion right? why do you sound so upset?

at any rate, i will try to respond as best i can to your points (some of them excellent by the way).

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because i know others are reading these posts....i thought i would post this blog report on a recent peer reviewed article. this blog IS from a skeptic site so do your own research, but i found it fascinating:

maunder minimum possible?
 
so this year's melt season is coming to an end (a few weeks left tops) and clearly it has been another year of recovery compared to 2007 and 2008. still, it is an overall low year compared to the years immediately preceding those years.

all in all the trend is still downward over the past few decades with a very short term recovery over the past 24 months. needless to say, this may merely be an anomaly in the overall downward trend, or it may be the beginning of a true recovery.

clearly this next 12 months will be interesting in this regards as another recovery like the past 2 years will mean that the ice extent is back in the middle of the pack in terms of the past 8 years (but still low over the past 30).

nonetheless, i think 3 years in a row of year over year recovery would be an interesting piece of data that could suggest more recovery going forward particularly if we have another year without new global temperature records. only time will tell.

ice graph up to now
 
oh...one more thing. it is still POSSIBLE that this year could catch last year's melt, but highly unlikely. it would take the most dramatic melt off this time of the year that we have ever seen just to catch 2008, much less 2007. furthermore, the wind patterns, falling temperatures, and slowing melts suggest that this season is indeed coming to an end. we should reach the minimum within the next 3 weeks (although a few years have taken longer this is the best bet) and perhaps even by the 15th of September.
 
so after almost another week of melt it is clear that this year won't catch last year's melt. in fact it is now about 500,000 square kilometers behind. so this was another strong recovery year in an otherwise downtrend going back 30 years. should be interesting to see if this continues or is merely an anomaly, but it does make the original point of this thread a bit more amusing.

here is the link.......

ice graph from the past 8 years

i will post another link once we truly reach the end of the melt season...it looks like we are very close (have already had one day that the ice actually grew) but this could take another week or so to reach the bottom.

currently it is JUST above 2005's minimum meltoff, but will almost surely pass it. still, it will probably end much closer (within 100,000 or less) to 2005 than to 2008 which was @ 450,000 square kilometers above 2007.
 
quick update....for the 2nd time this year we have had an "up" day already. this isn't a sure sign that the melting is over, but it is a strong sign that we are very close to the end. currently we are over 1,000,000 square kilometers above 2007's record low year and we are still about 600,000 above 2008's 2nd low season. in fact, if we have reached the low (a HUGE if at this point so consider this speculation), we have remained above 2005's 3rd lowest year leaving 2009 as the 4th lowest on record. all in all a very good recovery even if we slip slightly below 2005 before it's over.
 
with today's large jump upwards of 20,000 square kilometers we MAY already be past the minimum. however, another week of ups will confirm that. IF we have already reached the minimum, this year showed a 542,000 square kilometer increase over 2008's low of 4,707,813 square kilometers, which showed a 453282 square kilometer over 2007's historical low of 4254531. All in all, we are looking at 995,000 square kilometers of regrowth within 2 years. next year will be very pivotal.

Now, 2 years is hardly a trend worth mentioning although this one is admittedly fairly dramatic. But if we see a similar growth next year, then we will have a year with more ice than most of the past 8 years and a bit of a better argument could be made towards actual regrowth. all that can reasonably be said at this point is that the melting arctic has at least taken a 2 year respite from it's dramatic downturn. we are currently only 65,312 below 2005's low.....so any serious recovery next year would put us dramatically above years 2005-2009, but this year is still 782,187 below the minimum of 2003's minimum of 6,032,031 so we still have a ways to go!
 
well...a couple of days have passed and we have had 2 dramatic up days and now an even more dramatic DOWN day (although i expect the daily "correction" at 9:00 central time will soften that a bit). the low is still september 13th, but if today's melt (the 15th) holds and we have a repeat performance tomorrow, we could still have a lower minimum yet. regardless, it won't be too much lower and we have recovered over last year well over 500,000 square kilometers.
 
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