North pole to melt this year?

the last few days have seen the arctic sea ice extent drop precipitously. it is now in 2nd place and threatening to go into 3rd place. we shall see what happens.
 
the recent slide seems to have slowed down.....we have had 2 small drops in a row.....2010 is now in the middle of the pack (slightly above, but not impressively so) for the past 9 years.
 
continues to melt quickly....looks like this year has moved into 2nd from last place according to JAXA.
 
and the reason for this is sea ice extent measures just the ice not the age or thickness of the ice

thin new ice melts very quickly in the spring and summer

winter sea ice extent can be a bit deceptive in this respect

if you are going to ignore age and thickness, the only real measure should be late summer/early fall minimum because then thickness and age are significantly less relevant
 
yeah..it is now about tied with the lowest we have from the past 8 or 9 years. should be an interesting summer. we could have all sorts of crazy prognostications if this continues!
 
actually...that's not as true as it looks. the Arctic has significantly thickened since 2007 (whose meltoff was largely due to bizarre weather patterns that blew tons of ice out of the Barent's sea into the warmer waters that melted it). in fact, while the extent has dropped to a low mark for this time of year....there is much thicker ice than 2007 that still will have to melt if we are going to get a new low.

it should be interesting to see what happens for sure....because this low mark is dramatic for this time of year. ice volume increasing?
 
sorry guys...i wasn't shirking my responsibility here...i was in california for 3.5 weeks and just didn't have the energy to stay on top of hornfans too.

ok, so currently 2010 is still in last position but this last week it has closed the gap almost entirely with 2007. the sites i have read suggest that we should see it pass 2007 and 2008, but 2009 is up in the air. difficult to say for sure from the charts but we are setting up for a very cold winter if accuweather is to be believed (note: i listen to Joe Bastardi, who is a noted skeptic and he has been arguing for about 2 months that this summer's ice will be low (still higher than 2007 but then rebound considerably over the next few years).
 
as far as i know he got a bachelor's degree in meteorology....but i am much more interested in if he is correct or not. so i guess we will find out.

let's see, last year.....we had a ton of scientists predict the final ice melt off in the Arctic about halfway through the summer...and MOST of them were WAY off......but that doesn't stop you from listening to them does it GT? it seems that at issue is the methods that are being used, not who is using them. what reason would i have for believing those groups from last year? their curiculum vitae?

ice modelers predictions
 
No one has ever claimed that science is infallible. The difference between science and pseudoscience, MOP, is that science is self-correcting. Scientists err, they admit the error, they correct the error, then they go on. That is how science advances.

Pseudoscience, on the other hand, is limited to mischaracterizing the work of scientists. So yes, MOP, you can listen to climate scientists, or you can listen to media weathermen such as Bastardi and Watts.

texasflag.gif
 
What does that leave us with, Coelacanth?

Abandonment of education and advanced training? If the opinion of a bachelor's level weatherman carries the same weight on a scientific issue as a Ph.D. geophysicist we may as well forget everything we've gained as a civilization.

Science ain't perfect but it beats the alternatives.

texasflag.gif
 
as someone who is trained at the Master's level in the Queen of Sciences, I concur with GT.
 
ok...so explain to me why we should trust arctic modelers who were wrong 12 months ago? there were 16 different modelers (many of these groups) and all but like 3 were terribly off. but your suggestion is that we believe them this year?

for the record, i am not saying i am trusting Bastardi yet, but i do appreciate his very specific predictions....i will be watching his prediction this year with great interest. by the way....the same groups that predicted last year are predicting again....we should see how they do, particularly the 3 which got it within the margin of error.
 
as an interesting comparison to these education level ad hominem arguments that GT is so fond of....my uncle is one of the world's foremost experts on DNA....he got his education at the University of Houston (which is basically open enrollment) and never went beyond his Bachelor's degree. Yet he has been flown all over the world for his expertise.

my best friends mother has about 100 patents for Motorola and now works as a private contractor. her education? A Bachelor's level engineering degree from UT 35 years ago. she has numerous time been put over teams with Masters and PhD's in engineering because she just flat out knows more than all of them......

the fact that Bastardi only has a Bachelor's level degree doesn't mean near as much to me as it does to GT and Theu.....sorry, if i am not as impresses as some by higher level degrees. heck, i even have my Masters in Divinity and I am still not impressed....i remember being unimpressed with my PhD philosophy professors in college in many instances....i don't see it as meaning much more than that someone has a great work ethic and took the time necessary to stick with a subject.
 
Yeah, the whole "trust us, we have advanced degrees and we are the experts" is not going to wash anymore. You guys need to come up with something much better than that. These people have not demonstrated their trustworthiness or their reliability at all.

Trust is earned, not given. And knowing that these people have advanced degrees does not establish them as experts. Not by a long-shot.
 
I don't think professional training is necessarily to be despised, but it is badly oversold. It's especially handy for those that don't do well with original thinking.

But let's be real: what sort of handicap is it, really, for a person to lack formal training in a field that lacks a formal discipline? This is not mathematics, THEU, where we have proofs and axioms to guide us. It's the collective musings and speculations of a highly interested group about a poorly understood system that has an almost infinite number of moving parts.

Those who study that system have an enormous data set with which to work, and from which they can derive almost any conclusion that occupies their imagination.
 
hornpharmd....that was true until last night.....2007 went back into last place for ice with 2010 following closely behind....it could get interesting from here. many skeptics have pointed out that the ice has been compacting upon itself so that it is much thicker today than back in 2007 at the same point. on top of that (and this is awkward for your position i would suggest) the temperatures in the arctic have been largely running near or below average for the past seven or eight weeks. so if this is global warming, it is a bit strange don't you think? by the way, this graph shows the average for the 1958-2002 date range:



arctic temperatures

although before that it was certainly above average.......so perhaps it was just melting due to that?
 
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