Tuesday, June 12, 2012

100% Natural Spontaneous Phase Change

Formerly known as Ice Melts

As Neven has pointed out the Northern Sea Route is opening something fierce.  Of course, Hudson's Bay is melting and the sea ice extent is diving


If you look at Cryosphere Today, is even lower than 2011.  Bremen shows the current state


This was all pretty obviously going to happen given how thin the ice was over large areas.  Stoat has something on that.  Not likely to end well either




13 comments:

Anonymous said...

One of the other things that amazed me about the depth of the Denialati's scientific ignorance was the crowing from them at the end of this year's northern winter, when extent had reached the average as depicted on graphs of the annual cycle. They interpretted this as the ice having "recovered".

Of course, nothing of the sort had happened. All that it meant was that the winter extent had simply (and temporarily) reached the average value for a parameter that has been consistently decreasing for decades. It didn't change the import or the direction of said parameter's continuing decrease - it was simply one little statistical wiggle on a path that's as inexorably set as is the futility of making aware those who deny that which they do not understand, or who do not wish to understand that which they actually do understand, but do not like.

For true recovery to be observed, the trajectory would need to reach a value rather above the average for the declining decades, and it would need to do so for both extent and for volume, and for more than a few years running.

But can the denialist mob understand this? Apparently not.


Bernard J. Hyphen-Anonymous XVII, Esq.

Miguelito said...

Is there a version of graph that shows the standard deviations around the averages for each decade? Or the min-max around each decade? It might help demonstrate how very low these most recent years have been when compared to the historical ranges.

EliRabett said...

Eli believes that Neven has most of that, but the max-min is at RR

dbostrom said...

"Ice melts" is a pinko, Leftist description. "100% natural spontaneous phase change" is better.

Anonymous said...

I am monitoring the daily melt rate, and indeed it has never been so large so soon.

I notice in the SEARCH predictions, no one is predicting a Sept ice extent larger than 5km^2. Including the WUWT predicton!! The 5 km^2 barrier was only broken in 2007 - so is even Anthony losing faith in "recovery"!

Toby

EliRabett said...

The melt rate in June was always going to be huge this year because so much thin ice had formed outside (and to an extent) inside the Arctic Basin, and that ALWAYS goes away.

The truly scary thing this year is the Northern Passage which is going to be open very, very early if trends continue. Look for major shipping to start using it.

This is, in one sense good news for the Russians because otherwise it is a bitch + 1 to get things into Siberia. OTOH, it will give new meaning to the words Russian mud bogs.

dhogaza said...

"The melt rate in June was always going to be huge this year because so much thin ice had formed outside (and to an extent) inside the Arctic Basin, and that ALWAYS goes away."

Yes, we had a lot of late freeze-up in March and April (even when the overall extent was dropping slowly in April) which obviously had to be thin as even today, the areas that froze have ice only a couple or three months old. It seemed obvious it would disappear in a virtual blink of an eye despite the cheers of the denialists regarding sea ice recovery blah blah.

Anonymous said...

"It might help demonstrate how very low these most recent years have been when compared to the historical ranges."

The long term graphs page at Neven's blog might give you some material to work with.

https://sites.google.com/site/arcticseaicegraphs/longterm

Clicking on the area and extent graphs in the 4th line can repay careful examination.

MinniesMum

Martin Vermeer said...

Good to see that this is still a total service blog. Including adaptive headlines

Jeffrey Davis said...

The image:
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_stddev_timeseries.png

shows the current ice extent almost 2 std deviations less than that of 2007 after having been almost 3 std deviations more than 2007 as recently as late April. That's plummeting like a bird of prey like grandma used to make.

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

Jay should annunciate Cadbury's Law any day now:

Since the melting point of ice is constant, climate change cannot happen

dbostrom said...

Since the melting point of ice is constant, climate change cannot happen.

That would probably fly pretty well in certain particularly dense atmospheres.

The trouble with that URL is checking that it works: a scorched neocortex, every time.

Today's headlines:

Spring warmth: weather, not climate

The carbon corruption: Iran, Sudan, and North Korea get millions in U.N. carbon credit funds

Climate models outperformed by random walks

A refreshing change on sea level policy – use historical data rather than model projections

J Bowers said...

dbostrom -- "That would probably fly pretty well in certain particularly dense atmospheres."

Always worth reminding the passing reader that WUWT's $88,000 web project is being funded by Heartland Institute, who recently referred to it in their blurb as "their" project.