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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."
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.