Slashdot Mirror
Arctic Sea Ice Rallies a Bit
radioweather writes "Like the recent stock market rebound, Arctic sea ice is making a big rally over the record low set last year. According to the Alaskan
IARC-JAXA website, satellite data which shows sea
ice extent as of 10/14/08 was 7,064,219 square kilometers, when compared
to a year ago 10/14/08 it was 5,487,656 square kilometers. The one-day gain between 10/13/08 and 10/14/08 of 3.8% is also
quite impressive. On May 5th, The National Snow and Ice Data Center suggested
the possibility of an ice-free north pole
in 2008, but so far, this year has been a banner year for sea ice recovery."
Uhh....what? http://moneycentral.msn.com/detail/stock_quote?Symbol=$INDU
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
News reports have indicated that the earth's weather climate has been constantly shifting over millions of years.
Seriously, I wish people would stop getting so shocked about this. I remember reading in school about things like Ice ages and constaly changing climates, and I'm not that old. I beleive man's impact on the enviroment, while measurable, is severly overblown.
According to the study's website, the extent of the ice coverage is an estimate "calculated by certain algorithm."
It would be premature to suggest this as a panacea without knowing the statistics behind this estimate. Without this, we don't know if 3.8% is even statistically significant? They don't even offer a margin of error.
Even the "Data Download" offers only the bottom line estimate at a given point in time. What is the formula that feeds into that?
Does that signal an end to Global warming ?
... as of 10/14/08 was 7,064,219 square kilometers, when compared to a year ago 10/14/08 it was 5,487,656 square kilometers.
...its called *Winter*
Long live polar bears!
2008
is the coldest year of the 21st century and output from the sun is declining.
Maybe Al Gore and his carbon cult followers were...wrong.
I hear soybeans and arctic ice are really hot right now.
The Mauder Sunspot Minimum in the 17th century has been arguably tied to the Little Ice Age, a cool period. The new 11-year sunspot cycle #24 has been very slow to start as predicted in late 2007. There have been as few as five sunspots in all of 2008. During the active part of the cycle there are up to 150 at a time. The sun is about 0.1% weaker during the cycle minimum. Perhaps this correlates with cooler weather. There are better tools now for tying solar weather with earth climate and maybe someone will find a causal tie.
With all of the people doing predatory gaming the sea, it was only a matter of time before there was an Ice market crash. I, for one, am glad that Mother Nature stepped in to "bail out" the "too big to melt" iceburgs.
I'm sure President Palin will fight back the ice fantastically efficiently, for the good of the economy. You betcha!
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Scientists today who have seen greater ice formation towards the end of the year have been applying for grants to prove a new theory of theirs ... one they call "Winter - an Annual Period of Cold - does it exist?". Millions of dollars are pouring in to fund these scientists to discover whether or not the North Pole gets colder during the months of October to March each year.
Try some ISO 8601 loveliness you crazy apes!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
It's important to keep in mind that this isn't a measure of how much ice there is in the arctic.
The figures they are reporting are sea ice coverage estimates, and typically work as follows: the arctic is broken up into a grid, and for each area of the grid which does not fall on land they ask the question "is >15% of the surface covered with ice?"
If the answer is yes, it's counted as "ice;" if not, not.
There are several ways this can give results you wouldn't expect:
--MarkusQ
If the ice it's really coming back... I'd like to know why :)
Ia! Ia! Cthulhu F'thagn!
Extension is relevant, of course, but... does this report take into account the thickness of the ice? I mean, if you have 10 km^2 of ice with an average thickness of 10 cm, you still have a lot less ice than when you had 8 km^2 with an average thickness of 50 cm....
Come on people it's not about global warming anymore. It's about "Climate Change." Yes, that means when ever the climate changes it's must be caused by humans. The experts predicted 10 years ago that the temperature today would be warmer but they were wrong. Michel Jarraud, who is a big fan of global warming, of the World Meteorological Organization reluctantly admitted that global temperatures have not risen since 1998, according to a BBC article. Global snowfall is at record levels and there are fewer, not more, hurricanes.
So the volcanos on the Lomonosov and Gakkel ridges shut down. Less steam heating of the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, less ice melts at the top of the ocean.
And this boggles peoples minds because....?
"But what your so sure of you shouldn't be."
Good advise, but your own risk assesment that you are 'so sure about' doesn't have any probability caveates at all?
The GP did have one such caveate (ie: 'likely'), the best science available says 'very likely'. But maybe I have misunderstood, maybe you are talking about the GP's implicit assumption that humans are causing the climate to change, if that's the case then the science says 'certain'.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
You're driving in complete darkness and someone tells you there might be a cliff nearby. You're told to err on the side of caution. What do you do?
Turn on the headlights. For fuck's sake do you WANT to get eaten by a grue?!
that while we thought we had nature on the ropes, nature rebounds and shows us that nature really is a mother.
"Suppose you were an idiot...and suppose you were a member of Congress...but I repeat myself." Mark Twain
Correct, but bear in mind that this isn't a measure of sea ice coverage either; it's a doubly aggregated value that must be taken with a dram of salt water. While it is true that the percentage of sea surface covered with ice is strongly correlated with local albedo, the percentage of sea surface parcels which are covered with more than a certain threshold percentage of ice is much less strongly correlated, especially when that percentage is far from the median. IIRC correctly, using the median value as the threshold and weighing it as the mode gives the best fit.
To but this more concretely, a set of parcels with ice coverage of (0.16,0.16,0.16,0.16,0.16) would have an albedo of 0.84*sea + 0.16*ice, but show up in this survey as 100% ice. A set with (0.14,0.14,0.99,0.14,0.14) would have an actual albedo almost twice as high (0.69*sea + 0.31*ice) but show up in this survey as only 20% ice.
--MarkusQ
Earth heats up: summer
Earth cools down: winter
Now whether there's a 50 year trend up or down gives you whether the CLIMATE is changing.
Remember we cannot let this divert our focus on fighting climate change.
The polar bear is often regarded as a marine mammal because it spends many months of the year at sea.[24] Its preferred habitat is the annual sea ice covering the waters over the continental shelf and the Arctic inter-island archipelagos. These areas, known as the "Arctic ring of life", have relatively high biological productivity in comparison to the deep waters of the high Arctic.[20][25] The polar bear tends to frequent areas where sea ice meets water, such as polynyas and leads (temporary stretches of open water in Arctic ice), to hunt the seals that make up most of its diet.[26] Polar bears are therefore found primarily along the perimeter of the polar ice pack, rather than in the Polar Basin close to the North Pole where the density of seals is low.
...
Annual ice contains areas of water that appear and disappear throughout the year as the weather changes. Seals migrate in response to these changes, and polar bears must follow their prey.
The 'original' poster is right. Polar bears do Not go that far north.
No, it was a heuristic I picked up from a statistician I worked with years ago, and I'm not even certain I've stated it correctly.
The basic idea is a generalization of the rounding rule. If you have a bunch of values evenly distributed between 0.0 and 1.0 you can approximate their sum by counting how many are >= 5.0 and multiplying by 10. So I see already that I got it wrong. The real rule would be count everything over the median as twice the mean, and the mode doesn't figure into it. Unless I'm still remembering incorrectly.
That should teach me to post late at night. My advice would be, if you need to know the actual rule, consult a statistician or a good statistics book, not random programmers on slashdot.
--MarkusQ
P.S. My failure to remember the best of many bad ways to doubly aggregate data actually underscores my main point, which is that its a very tricky thing to get right, and even in the best of circumstances you have to be careful drawing conclusions from the results. * And if
Ambitwistor has posted over 30 replies in this thread, all of which were well written and well thought out.
Since the majority were done during working hours, and since most anyone would be fired for screwing around on the internet during working hours, it is clear that Ambitwistor is a paid hack working for the Global Warming Industry.
As such, his posts are nothing more than propaganda, his science is crap, and he should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
...this really is only a matter of opinion since we lack the ability to perform meaningful (as in, all factors are controlled or accounted for) experiment.
No, it isn't. Some opinions are more valid than others. Some opinions are more correct than others. Science involves observing nature. Since we know things like thermodynamics and mechanics and kinematics, we can understand how nature works simply by observing it.
We don't need to have a 2*10^30 kg ball of hydrogen confined in a spherical laboratory to understand the sun; we can examine at it, and apply what we know about nature to understand how it works.
We don't have to watch rock layers being laid down over millions of years, or the effects of vulcanism over all 4 billion-plus years of our planet's existence to understand how these things work; we can examine sedimentation, geomagnetism, and other geomorphology, and apply what we know about nature to understand how it works.
We don't have to watch ~3.8+ billion years of biopolymer interaction to understand genetic drift, fossilization and speciation; we can examine fossils, life forms, genes and biopolymers in front of us (though actuallywe can measure genetic drift rates directly) and understand how it all works.
Perhaps you think it is merely an opinion that the stars are distant suns; that since cannot perform controlled experiments of any kind on them but merely observe them, that the opinion that they are campfires is just as "valid" as the "politically-motivated, scientifically vacuous 'distant suns' theory". Your assertion that the anthropogenic nature of global warming is some mere opinion is of the same kind.
It seems that your comments in this discussion are more about "damage control" than about discovering what's actually happening in Nature. The problem isn't just that you're unfamiliar with climatological literature, but that you're resorting to anti-science to bolster your present convictions. The former can be amended by simply studying the subject matter (whatever the subject), but the latter is much a much more serious error. It's the one crank [pseudo-] scientists use to cling to their position:
"Since the mainstream could in principle turn out to be wrong, I could still in principle turn out to be right. Even though my position is only an opinion, theirs must also only be an opinion, so they can be equally valid."
Seriously; this "just-an-opinion" thing is just so much blown smoke and I think you realize it. It is no longer a reasonable scientific conjecture that global warming is *not* anthropogenic. No matter how ideologically displeasing we may find it that it is so (or that stars are distant suns and that our part of the universe is ordinary, etc.), that's just how reality is. It's physical fact. You couldn't argue reality into being some other way even if you could manage to convince all your fellow humans that the sun goes around the earth or that global warming either doesn't exist or isn't anthropogenic. Please try to take a more objective and enlightened view than you have been.