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Arctic Sea Ice Rallies a Bit

Posted by timothy on from the mysterious-ways dept.

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."

20 of 152 comments (clear)

  1. Stock market what? by Drakin020 · · Score: 2, Insightful
    FTH:

    Like the recent stock market rebound...

    Uhh....what? http://moneycentral.msn.com/detail/stock_quote?Symbol=$INDU

    --
    The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
  2. THIS IS A SLASHDOT NEWS FLASH! by Rod+Beauvex · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:THIS IS A SLASHDOT NEWS FLASH! by pixelpusher220 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Lets ask this question:

      Do you want to walk on ice that froze an hour ago? or ice that's been solidly frozen for decades?

      The ice 'recovery' is a misnomer, even if it covers the entire arctic at peak winter, it won't be very thick compared with persistent perennial ice cover that has existed and built up thickness for hundreds/thousands of years.

      Replacing 'steel' with 'balsa wood' doesn't mean the structure can hold up the same weight. i.e. polar bears.

      --
      People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people :-D
    2. Re:THIS IS A SLASHDOT NEWS FLASH! by Rei · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I think it's cute how people like you think that the IPCC is either unaware of or deliberately ignoring papers like this ;)

      Seriously -- read the report some time. It'll be educational for you. There's something like 50 papers referenced for just sunspots alone. If it A) has to do with global warming, even tangentially, and B) was published in a peer-reviewed journal in the past 10-20 years, odds are it's in there.

      Science does not work in a manner of "this one paper says one thing about one aspect, so it must be God's honest truth!". The amount of research out there is pretty staggering. It is... let's just say "unfortunate" that the popular press has a habit of picking up one work or another and sensationalizing them.

      --
      If I ever become wealthy and mad, I'll leave Companion Cubes on desert islands for shipwreck survivors.
    3. Re:THIS IS A SLASHDOT NEWS FLASH! by LWATCDR · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You do know that we have a less then 200 years of good data on climate don't you?
      Heck I am even all for cutting carbon just to be safe.
      But what your so sure of you shouldn't be.

      --
      See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
    4. Re:THIS IS A SLASHDOT NEWS FLASH! by Ambitwistor · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You do know that we have a less then 200 years of good data on climate don't you?

      Yes, which is what tells us that the late 20th century warming is faster than natural, because we also have data on the usual natural sources of warming and cooling such as solar activity and volcanoes.

      But what your so sure of you shouldn't be.

      The Earth is 4 billion years old, but we don't need 4 billion years of data to understand something about what's happening to the Earth now. Sure there is uncertainty, and more than a couple hundred years of accurate data helps. But the instrumental data we do have is enough to tell us that something anomalous is going on, when compared to the various measured factors in the climate system which are normally responsible for climate change.

    5. Re:THIS IS A SLASHDOT NEWS FLASH! by JimboFBX · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You do realize that all historical data that predates accurate measurements are just very rough estimates that are open to interpretation and completely unopen to experimental proof and disproof, right? I can't grab a rock, do something to for a million years, and prove that I was right that it looks the way it does because of it. As a programmer, I can argue that I'm initially wrong about the cause of bugs in programs I wrote 80%+ of the time. However, unlike a program, where i can prove or disprove myself right or wrong quite quickly (hopefully), a geologist or climatologist can't when it comes to large scale theories like this. Its all a cycle of pre-knowledge with very few people challenging what they were fundamentally taught.

      Climatology is more or less a pseudo-science, at best a scientific research project. It, by definition, is not humanly possible to prove right or wrong. There is no isolation of variables, perceived close similarities. Whatever you don't account for is assumed to be not a factor, when it in reality easily could be. I could say my dog can't learn tricks, it must either be unintelligent, hard of hearing, or hard of seeing. These are the only factors I'm considering. Eventually, I come to the conclusion he can see fine and hear fine, so it must be he is unintelligent. But in reality, its my teaching style that is the cause - something I fundamentally assumed was correct. For the sake of the argument, lets say, like the climate, I am only given ONE dog to work with, so if I had been able to grab other dogs and find they all don't learn new tricks, I would have went "ah ha!" and realized it wasn't my dog that was the problem. We only have one Earth, one sun, one timeline. We can only build models based off our current understanding how things work, and those models can only be assumed correct if they come up with the same conclusion I have already made. Of course, I'm not saying global warming more or less isn't being affected by humans, because it must be. At the very least, consider all of the artificial heat we create with our cars, computers, heaters, air conditioners, etc. But the amount of effect is open way too much up for debate and not much else.

    6. Re:THIS IS A SLASHDOT NEWS FLASH! by zippthorne · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Prepare to be amazed! Balsa wood craft are capable of crossing the pacific, and may have been one of the ways in which some pacific islands were populated.

      The incredible leap is steel ships, not wooden. The idea that something that sinks as readily as steel would be a good marine material surely had a lot of public opinion inertia to overcome.

      --
      Can you be Even More Awesome?!
  3. Yeah... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    ...its called *Winter*

  4. Re:Wait... by The+Mighty+Buzzard · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Of course not. I'll explain.
    Earth heats up: Global Warming
    Earth cools down: Global Warming getting worse.

    --
    Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
  5. Cold is on the way... by dtjohnson · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Cold is on the way... by moosesocks · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Solar output and atmospheric heat retention are two completely independent variables.

      The fact that one is rising, while the other is falling is merely a fortunately coincidence.

      My own personal view is that there's a heck of a lot that we don't know about the mechanics of the atmosphere. Until we figure everything else out, though, it's probably a good idea to err on the side of caution.

      --
      -- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
    2. Re:Cold is on the way... by NotmyNick · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Ironic isn't it that some people who so easily dismiss decades of research by thousands of scientists will so willingly glom onto one report that might ever so slightly support their lifestyle choice?

      --
      Notmysig
    3. Re:Cold is on the way... by Ambitwistor · · Score: 4, Insightful

      If I'm told to err on the side of caution, do you know what I would do? Nothing!

      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? Speed up? I think not. You stop, or at least slow down.

      Right now CO2 levels are already higher than they've been in at least a million years, and we're increasing them at an accelerating pace. Basic physics as well as our observations of present and past climate suggest that this will lead to warming, possibly by a dangerous amount.

      Continuing to add CO2 at an accelerating pace may be "doing nothing different", but it is not "doing nothing". It is doing a very significant Something.

      We don't know everything about the climate, but we know that reducing CO2 back to pre-industrial levels is unlikely to do anything worse than keep us at the present climate (and even then we are likely to still warm a little due to heat already stored in the ocean). By contrast, there are a lot of climate risks associated with staying on our current emissions trajectory.

    4. Re:Cold is on the way... by AJWM · · Score: 3, Insightful

      My own personal view is that there's a heck of a lot that we don't know about the mechanics of the atmosphere. Until we figure everything else out, though, it's probably a good idea to err on the side of caution.

      And which side is caution on, exactly? Spending money (that could be used for other things) to reduce CO2 emissions "just in case", or not spending money tinkering with CO2 because if global warming turns out not to be anthropogenic, we could bring on the next (little?) ice age?

      (I happen to think the effects of a minor global temperature increase are a lot less serious than the effects of another ice age, but that my just be my Canadian upbringing talking.)

      --
      -- Alastair
    5. Re:Cold is on the way... by Ambitwistor · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You are conceding, then, that the reflectivity of the cloud cover can vary from year to year. That puts you ahead of many global warming advocates.

      No, it's a well known fact.

      Isn't it also possible that warmer surface temperatures (which you must admit would be expected with global warming) would lead to increased evaporation, increased atmospheric moisture, and increased cloud cover, thereby increasing reflectivity and providing a global temperature feedback control mechanism?

      Yes. There are two major cloud feedbacks, one for cloud albedo cooling as you describe, and one for cloud greenhouse warming.

      Yet, current models either don't account for that or simply assume that reflectivity is constant.

      That's wrong; dynamic cloud feedbacks are in all modern GCMs.

      Nevertheless, the CO2 theory of global warming must result in more heat present in the oceans every year.

      No, it doesn't, for reasons I just stated.

      Of course, that's not what is observed, which completely undermines the entire simplistic theory of co2-based global warming,

      As I just said, (1) cloud modulation alters your claim of "monotonic heat increase", and (2) ocean heat observations are not very accurate.

      but its adherents wave that away as a minor point,

      That's because there isn't anything yet statistically inconsistent with model predictions.

      just as they ignore variations in heat originating in the planetary core

      They're ignored because they've been measured and are utterly negligible, on the order of a hundredth of a degree.

      and variations in solar output.

      Those aren't ignored either; there is a large literature of it, and is in fact one of the pieces of evidence supporting CO2-induced warming. Solar output trends are inconsistent with the warming which has been observed.

    6. Re:Cold is on the way... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      2008
      is the coldest year of the 21st century

      Yes, and... 2008 is still one of the top 10 hottest years on record. As lovely as "coldest year of the 21st century" sounds, we should remember that the 21st century is still less than 9 (very hot) years old.

    7. Re:Cold is on the way... by Ambitwistor · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You might say that variations in reflectance are a "well known fact" but the fact is that studies of the effect of reflectance on global warming are relatively recent

      Study of stochastic fluctuations in forcing on global warming go back until at least the 1970s; in fact, it was an early competing hypothesis to the greenhouse effect. Hasselmann's 1976 paper is seminal here, although I'm not sure which paper was the first to look at clouds specifically.

      and are not properly accounted for in current models.

      It's true that clouds are the least properly modeled aspect of the climate. For prediction that's important; for historical attribution, it's less important, because we've measured it. It's not true that you can replace the greenhouse forcing with cloud albedo fluctuations and successfully explain 20th century global warming. The measured albedo changes cause significant variability on sub-decadal scales, but can't explain the main long term trend. You should read the paper that your link cites. They address this exact point.

      Would you concede that the alleged 'greenhouse' effect of CO2 warming occurs every year or do you you claim that the CO2 molecules take an occasional year off? If the effect of atmospheric CO2 on heat retention is continuous (which it must be if the theory is correct), then increased heat must be retained every year.

      For the third time, this is false: more heat doesn't have to be retained if it doesn't reach the surface in the first place. There are year to year fluctuations in this amount, due to clouds, which on the long term are dominated by CO2 but in the short term cause significant natural variability.

      And, once again, even when the oceans are warming, it's very hard to measure on the short term how much heat is actually going into or coming out of the oceans. After a couple decades it adds up, but on decadal scales it's extremely noisy. Right now there are three or four major ocean heat data sets out there (Levitus, Gouretski, Domingues, etc.), and they have first-order differences between each other due to the difficulty in making these measurements. They all show a substantial long term trend over the past 60 years, but they disagree in the magnitude of that trend by up to 30%, and if you start looking at year-to-year measurements, it's much noisier.

      You claim that the variation in planetary core heat causes a variation in temperatures on the crust of "a hundredth of a degree" but the fact is that no one has any idea what the variation in heat from the core even is, much less what the magnitude of the temperature variation that might be resulting from it is.

      Like most of what you say, this too is wrong. Your personal ignorance is not a proxy for what the scientific community does and does not know. In particular, we have deep borehole measurements into the Earth's crust which do not show significant heat rising from the depths. See, for instance, Beltrami et al.'s 2002 paper in GRL. The heat flux is about two orders of magnitude smaller than what is needed to account for observed global warming. Not to mention the oceans also show a top-down penetration of heat, not bottom-up.

      Finally, you claim that variations in solar output are inconsistent with the warming which has been observed in those oceans which, according to you, don't have more heat present every year.

      Oceans will, on average, tend to have more heat present every year. However, as I keep pointing out, from year to year there is substantial variation in the surface heat flux. I know you really want to ignore climate physics in favor of anything that will support your prejudices, but you really need to sit down with a textbook and learn something about how the climate works.

      And yes, variations in solar output are inconsistent with both surface warming and ocean heat penetration.

      The problem with your entire belief system on this issue is that it is based on what you want the facts to be rather than what they are.

      What a hypocrite you are.

  6. slow start of next sunspot cycle too by peter303 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  7. Re:Statistics? by rwade · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The 3.8% was a one day change, not the total observed ice reformation. The linked article says that current coverage is back to 2005 levels.

    How did they determine what the 2005 levels were?
    How did they determine what today's levels are?

    Without that information, we do not know whether this information is credible. I suppose the question should be: how do we know the delta between today and 2005 is statistically significant?

    People are arguing whether this is caused by man or not, which political candidate is going to under-respond or over-respond, but what is the point in doing that if the data is B.S. in the first place?