North pole to melt this year?

i agree to an extent....the trend for the past 30 years has been towards the ice conditions of the 40's....but that's not surprising since we have been in largely positive multi-decadal oscillations. now that they seem to be heading negative, it is not surprising to see 2 years of good recovery. this year will be quite interesting. remember...last year was supposed to beat 2007's low mark according to the climate modelers you trust so much but it didn't even beat 2008....instead it was about a million square kilometers ahead of 2007. i am very curious to see if the negative AO for the past 6 months will lead to more or less ice at the end of this next year's meltoff...
 
so due to the last 2 days of freezing the Arctic surpassed 2005's peak and is not set to be no lower than 4th lowest....depending on how the next week goes it has a chance (albeit small in my opinion) of catching 2004 and 2009 in terms of peak ice. but 2004 is 200,000 square km ahead still and 2009 is 250,000 square km....so my guess is it falls short by around 100,000 or so.
 
well...another good day....we saw ice increase by 55,000 square kilometers in one day. considering we probably have less than 7 days of growth left this was a surprisingly large bump (one would expect the growth to be trailing off very quickly this late in the game). more than likely my last prediction on this issue remains true, but now 2010 is only 145,000 square kilometers from catching 2004, which would be quite a feat.

IJIS
 
When should you measure arctic sea ice and how exactly do you measure it?

You should only measure it in the summer if you are not going to consider the depth of the ice because otherwise a few inches of frozen water which quickly melts in the spring gets mistaken for feet of thick permanent ice sort of like long and repeated posts of nonsense get mistaken for substance.

seasonal.extent.1900-2007.jpg
 
thats a good point paso....i am glad you said that. we will keep watching the summer ice.....but once again, i am not arguing that the world has not warmed and i am not arguing that the ice has not melted....just the cause. i am interested to see if we see recovery because that will show natural causes (if we get enough over enough time obviously).

by the way paso, i am not sure where that graph came from but i will say that those figures seem highly disparate with "cryosphere today" and with even the IJIS. and once again, it bears repeating that the Antarctic, which has 90 % of the world's ice has actually grown....even it's summer lows have grown:

Antarctic Ice since 1979

put another way...if the Antarctic has 90% of the world's ice, and even if the Arctic has the entire other 10% (which it doesn't)...even if the Arctic had lost 50% in the past Century, we are still only talking about 5% of the world's ice. Now I do recognize the other concerns with albedo etc....but there are also great uncertainties about cloud cover and other thermostatic flexibilities.....all in all, i don't think it is reasonable to be freaking out about a downturn in Arctic Ice and the regrowth of 1 million square kilometers of ice in the past 2 summers is at least noteworthy (but not much else for now).
 
texoz...you mean natural weather patterns that have already happened many times in earth's geological history? yeah.....you busted me, i am not terribly concerned.
 
well, i keep being surprised by the late season ice formation. Again today there was a very significant freezing of about 100,000 square kilometers of ice. that is almost unheard of this late in the season which seems to suggest this freezing season may last a bit longer than past years. regardles, we are now just 19,000 square kilomters below 2004 and only 46,000 from 2009....which means that 2008 is no longer out of the question (as i assumed it was just 2 nights ago). still, all things considered i suspect we don't reach 2008 but it is now looking like we will pass 2004 and most likely 2007.
 
Unless the numbers are faked on my chart, the summer ice extent in the 40's was nowhere near as low as it is now. It is the green line.
 
And on the myth that Antarctica is gaining ice.

Antarctica_Ice_Mass.gif


The issue is more complex than just this land mass chart (and I know it is over a short time frame but it is all the satellite data we have and it is gravity based so it should be pretty solid data).

Antarctic land ice is decreasing at an accelerating rate, but at the same time sea ice is increasing. The skeptics focus solely on the increase in sea ice (mop's chart in his link is sea ice only). The sea ice is increasing despite a warming southern ocean (which should make you wonder how long this can continue and why it is occuring at all).

This link explains the issue in more detail.


The Link
 
thanks paso, you raise some good points. a couple of questions....

if the Antarctic is melting, then why are we not seeing an acceleration in the ocean level rise?

i suppose a possible answer is that with the Arctic on an overall downtrend, it is making up for it?

regardless, the next few years are going to be very interesting....if all of this melting is really happening, we should begin to see a rather dramatic rise in the oceans at some point soon wouldn't you think?
 
I think sea level is rising although I do not know the rate. Honestly, I have not really examined this issue much (I guess because it will have no impact on where I live). I primarily try to keep up with the chemistry and physics of the atmosphere including the models, but otherwise dable beyond those areas or what I run across (I knew that Skeptical Science had an article on Antarctica and I know Real Cliamte has written about it a few times).

My current interest is paleoclimatology although I will try to read up on this area some more.
 
hornpharmd....the point is you jumped on a typical AGW hysterical prediction and started a thread. 2 years later that prediction looks absurd. do you think the arctic has any chance of being ice free by 2012 now? of course not....yet these types of articles do have their effects on the masses....... you read enough headlines about bogus claims you actually start to believe it is true, but there are never any corrections or follow up to show how wrong the predictions were. my hope is that this thread will stand as a lasting testimony to how bogus most of these claims are.
 
paso, here is another interesting piece that gives a sharply different perspective than you.....

world climate report

it is interesting that to date, the rate of sea-level rise seems to have not changed at all, but we have been told again and again that this Century will see a dramatic rise in sea-levels. that better start happening soon if there is any chance of this prediction coming true.
 
As I recall, the IPCC AR4 (or maybe even 3) indicated that the arctic would be ice free by 2100. The fact that this will occur far more quickly (30-60 years) should be alarming for two reasons. First, it will significantly impact weather patterns, climate, and wildlife. Second, it demonstrates that the climate estimate can be too low rather than two high.
 
yeah...the IPCC said alot of things that have been shown to be ridiculous. forgive me if i don't take everything the IPCC says at face value....

and for you to say "this will occur" as if it is a foregone conclusion that our tiny slice of data on this is giving us full knowledge of the next 100 years is an overreach.
 
The point is that the IPCC was too conservative. It can be wrong as in too conservative about the temperature rise.
 
according to who? and how do we know that source is trustworthy? seems since the most dire predictions were made we have gained a million square kilomters in summer ice back.
 
IceProjection.gif


This chart shows the IPCC AR4 projections for Arctic summer ice. The red line is the mean and the dark blue is the 95% range. As you can tell by the black actual line the melting is occurring faster than projected. Now it has sprung back a bit (and the pink dashed line is pretty silly), but the trend is still faster than projected by even the most pessimistic of the IPCC AR4 models.

These are models of very complex systems and they can just as easily be too conservative as too liberal. What if the models are too conservative on temperature rise? I guess you take from this that if the model is wrong, we should throw it out. I take from this that the model is useful (because they obviously do predict the absence of summer ice) but we need to realize and look to see how they track (low or high).
 
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