North pole to melt this year?

oh...in other news....the sea ice race should be getting very interesting soon. currently 2010 is still only in 2nd position to only 2007 as the lowest on record. but judging by the DMI 30% concentration graph, there is reasonably good reason to expect it to at least top 2008 if not 2009. it is approximately one day behind 2008 at this point (in other words on August 14th, 2008 we saw a lower ice level than we saw today on the 13th......so it is neck and neck with 2008 but still far above 2007's record lows:

AMSRE_Sea_Ice_Extent.png
 
paso...you are still not answering the question as to why you are uniquely equipped to translate this article for me. i am not suggesting you aren't, but really would love to know what the basis of your confidence is.

i noticed you did not want to comment on the fact that the Wall Street Journal Editorial was written by a Professor of Environmental Sciences for 17 years (stepped away from that career in 2007). What do you think of the critiques of the climategate "investigation?" I know you really want to believe that climategate was much ado about nothing, but it was sadly much more than that. it revealed how a few can stop honest scientific inquiry and manipulate data to their ends (e.g. "hide the decline")

here is a good response by the articles of the original journal article

authors' response
 
mop

What you do not seem to understand is that science is the pursuit of a truth or really the pursuit of something that cannot be disproved (evolution is a perfect example of a theory that has withstood innumerable challenges and remained standing although modified at times around the edges). I can tear the claim of some connection between decades of warming purportedly contained in the article by McLean to absolute pieces although he even admits this.

The basic article contains the rather simplistic notion that an El Nino causes atmospheric warming several months later. This is sort of a no duh conclusion although the timing of it is kind of interesting. There then is a throw away and unsupported sentence at the end that "perhaps" this might explain warming over the last 30 years. This comment should not have passed peer review because it is unsupported and unscientific.

ENSO is a well known periodic heating and cooling of the surface waters in the tropical Pacific that has some influence on weather in the Pacific and the Americas (although there are weak and strong events). It runs in periodic cycles though so over time it balances out (ie there is no net gain or loss from ENSO although there is a hypothesis that global warming has either increased the number of El Nino events or their intenstity - do not get the causation backwards).

I am very familiar with ENSO because some of the climate models acount for it and other just smooth the temperature curve. ENSO is not a worldwide phenomena although strong ENSO events can influence global temperatures.

How did I know McLean was full of **** (at least on what he tried to sneak into his paper and then claim in a press release)? This is pretty easy. I knew he was full of **** for several simple reasons. I know that ENSO cycles far more regularly than 35 years (between 3-7 years with 5 being the norm). It cycles several times in a decade. I also knew two other things about ENSO. It is regional and the overall ocean is warming not warming and then cooling. The tropical Pacific while a very large and important body of water is not the global ocean. And many ENSO events are weak so they have little impact on global temperatures.

I knew all this without looking any of it up (except for the time frame on ENSO cycles because I thought it was 8-9 years). How? I am a lawyer by formal post-graduate education. I was, however, an honors graduate from UT School of Law and graded on to Texas Law Review. You probably do not know what this means, but it means I am really good at researching and understanding issues. It also means that I could have obtained a PhD in any number of my undergrad principal fields including biology. My undergrad eduation included three years of biology (28 hours), two years of chemistry, a year of physics, and calculus. I thought very seriously about getting a PhD in biology, but changed my mind at the last minute. Would this make me more qualified on this issue?

Science particularly what we term junk science is an issue that comes up with some frequency in my practice so I have to be familiar with the scientific method and manner of proof (or disproof). You can look up the cases of Daubert and its progeny on the federal level and Robinson and its progeny on the state level if you want to see what good lawyers know about science.

I do not think my academic credentials qualify or disqualify me from opining on science issues particularly ones where there actually is a wrong answer. McLean's paper does not prove or even support what his press release says it does (indeed, even he admits this). You though cite him for some "controversy" or "dispute" that you pretty clearly cannot support independently and almost certainly do not understand. This sounds a lot like faith to me.
 
paso...do you have some data that leads you to the conclusion that the oceans are definitely warming? as far as i know ARGO shows only flat to cooling temperatures since it came online 7 years ago.....does this one Indonesian anomaly prove otherwise?
 
The oceans, like the atmosphere, have been warming (or retaining more and more heat). This is a multidecadenal event. Does the Indonesian event in and of itself "prove" this? No. Is it a probable symptom? Maybe. The area of warmth and the amount of warmth are both very anomolous.
In reply to:
Click to expand...
 
This is what I have been trying to find. This shows the volume trend.

Arctic_sea_ice_anomaly.gif


This imo is what we should track at both poles because sea ice extent can be somewhat misleading because of how it is measured.
 
global_ocean_heat.gif


The Link

I am not sure about the difference in Joules measured in the two studies. It might be time frame or layer of the ocean related (I believe one study looked at 300 meters and the other 700 meters). They are both large positive numbers though.
 
interesting stuff going on in the arctic.....we have already had some "up" days...but this ain't over yet. today it dropped about 22,000 but we will wait until the morning correction (usually by 10:00 AM CST) to see if that gets corrected upwards......at any rate, it has still not dipped below 2009's minimum extent, but that was 13 days after this last year so it is reasonable to expect that it will. regardless, it seems to be a virtual tie with last year because there shouldn't be more than a 150,000 to 200,000 max meltoff/compaction left in this year's melt season.....and we are still about 70,000 ahead of last year's low.

the la nina that is kicking in is promising to be a doozy, or at least that's more and more what it's looking like. the global temperatures will be dropping soon which means they will arrive in plenty of time to greatly increase Arctic ice.......looks like 2011 could be another uptick in ice extent in the north seas. if so, that will mean at least 3 out of 4 years of increasing ice.....not a powerful trend by any means (too short) but certainly not the "death spiral" talk that started this thread eh?
 
actually, what i said there was perfectly accurate.....i was speaking of the years since 2007's low ice extent...and then reasonably hypothesizing that next year will probably be up from this year (even AGW enthusiasts agree with that statement). i never claimed that it changed the 30 year trend (except to slow it's downward descent) so your point does not address mine.

it is going to end fairly steeply above 2008 just like last year did and it still has a chance of tying with 2009...although i think the best guess is that it dips below 2009 by 100,000 or so. you then picked some data about the Northwest Passage to try to suggest this makes a statement about multi-year ice, but actually volume and thickness have been growing the past few years. in fact, if you look at the 30% graph it is faring rather well the past 3 or 4 years.

Danish Meteorological Site on 30% ice thickness sea area extent

this would be a better indicator of multi year ice because it only counts areas that have at least 30% sea ice.
 
actually hornpharmd we just matched 2009's low last night...so we do appear to be going below 2009, however, we are quite far above 2008 and in fact, on DMI (the 30% graph) we are still slightly above even 2009. last year, from this point on 2009 only lost 130,000 square kilometers....we are more or less at the end of melt season but could still see a couple hundred thousand in melt and/or compaction of ice. regardless, it is almost a certainty that we will end far above 2008's low mark and still about 800,000 to 900,000 above 2007's lowest on record (the 30 years we actually have). my statements are not controversial....they are just reality at this point.
 
The arctic had an unusually cool summer due to a weather anomaly. The annual variations are meaningless when weather anomalies are removed from consideration or ignored.
 
Huh?

I am not sure what you are trying to say although I agree with your statement that short term weather variations are just noise.

There is, however, a statistically significant long term trend. It is not positive or neutral.
 
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