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Arctic Ice Cap Rebounds From 2012 — But Does That Matter?
bricko writes "There has been a 60 per cent increase in the amount of ocean covered with ice compared to this time last year, the equivalent of almost a million square miles. In a rebound from 2012's record low an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia's northern shores, days before the annual re-freeze is even set to begin. The Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific has remained blocked by pack-ice all year, forcing some ships to change their routes. A leaked report to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) seen by the Mail on Sunday, has led some scientists to claim that the world is heading for a period of cooling that will not end until the middle of this century." "Some scientsts" in this case do not include Dana Nuccitelli, who blogs cogently in reaction at The Guardian that the 60 percent increase observed in Arctic ice is "technically true, [but] also largely irrelevant." He has no kind words for the analysis in the Daily Mail (and similar report in The Telegraph), and writes "In short, this year's higher sea ice extent is merely due to the fact that last year's minimum extent was record-shattering, and the weather was not as optimal for sea ice loss this summer. However, the long-term trend is one of rapid Arctic sea ice decline, and research has shown this is mostly due to human-caused global warming." If you want to keep track of the ice yourself, Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis offers frequent updates.
60% increase. Yet no relevant data for scale to understand the shift. No wonder someone else called it 'technically true'.
Pointing at year-to-year variations in order to prove or disprove a phenomenon that has a time-scale of decades is stupid, no matter which side of the argument you're on. This is like saying you don't believe winter will be cold, because the weather is actually warmer today than it was last week.
To put this in some context, have a look at Jim Pettit's "spiral" graphs and consider that the grey zone in the NSIDC plots linked from the summary are still two standard deviations from the norm, and this year we're almost touching that (if that doesn't mean much to you now would be a good time to brush up on your statistics). So compared to last year we've gone from holy shit batshit insane outlier to just plain old holy shit.
https://sites.google.com/site/pettitclimategraphs/sea-ice-volume
To anyone about to complain that the number of samples is too short, 1) these measurements start when humanity invented the satellites to measure it - can't change that, and 2) we have deep Greenland ice cores for a pretty good idea of what was going on before.
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
For all they care, the ice cap could return to the extent of 1980 wthin a couple of years and all they'd say would be:
See, an extreme weather event! This proves climate change is true!
No. Climate is the mean value of a long series of datapoints observed over a long period of time.
Any one datapoint can vary up to several standard deviations from the mean, without affecting whether climate change is occuring or not.
Climate is by definition the long term pattern.
Climate change is a change in the long term pattern as time progresses. Therefore: no observation of a single datapoint is capable of saying much at all about the climate.
Observing a massive loss of ice or massive increase in ice one year is neither capable of proving, and also not capable of disproving climate change.
Furthermore; we know that climate change naturally occurs --- that is, there are natural cycles such as Milankovitch cycles; precession of earth's orbit, variation of Earth's tilt naturally effect climate over long periods of time.
There may be numerous things that contribute to natural climate changes.
The whole global warming argument; is there is some non-natural, or human created factors perturbing the natural climate changes that have and are occuring; because some correlation might have been observed with rising temperatures over time, and human development: measured from ice core samples.
This is already highly speculative; even relying on long-term data, that human activity has significantly accelerated or altered the natural climate change.
The trouble is: we don't fully understand what the natural change is, therefore: what mechanism allows us to measure how much humans supposedly affected it?
If it's so hard to show climate change based on long term data, then it's nigh impossible to infer ANYTHING from datapoints about what happened during 1 year.... there's no reason 2013 is a magic year where you can take an observation capable of showing that climate change isn't happening; it's simply not true that you can observe what happens in 2013, and infer from that any fact about climate change.
One, two, three, even 4 or 5 years in isolation does not establish a new climate pattern.
We're talking about 100-year trends here.
Why should we listen to fossil-fuel sponsored shills like Nuccitelli?
Or
Why does the above question only matter when a person questions AGW?
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
But the loss of sea-ice is at most measured over the last 30 years. So therefore by your statements, the apparent loss of Arctic sea ice cannot be proven to be related to climate change, whether natural or not.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
> No. Climate is the mean value of a long series of datapoints observed over a long period of time.
Oh. Would you care to point me to the hoards of level headed climate activists who say this about Hurricane Katrina or Sandy? I seem to have missed them. For what you say implies that they should be out there on the streets, shouting at the top of their lungs that hurricane activity is a mean value in a long series of datapoints observed over a long time and that "Any one datapoint can vary up to several standard deviations from the mean, without affecting whether climate change is occuring or not."
> Furthermore; we know that climate change naturally occurs --- that is, there are natural cycles such as Milankovitch cycles; precession of earth's orbit, variation of Earth's tilt naturally effect climate over long periods of time. There may be numerous things that contribute to natural climate changes.
Of course, there have never been variations over the course of 100 years. Such as the last 100 years. The climate has always been stable and people have always been able to easily adapt to anything nature threw at them, because it happened over a much longer time frame. Archeology begs to differ.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_civilization
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorset_culture
> The whole global warming argument; is there is some non-natural, or human created factors perturbing the natural climate changes that have and are occuring; because some correlation might have been observed with rising temperatures over time, and human development: measured from ice core samples.
Well no. The whole global warming argument, as put forward by the IPCC and the rest of the climate change community, is that human created factors far outstrip any natural causes. In fact the IPCC argues that there is a strong natural tendency of climate cooling at work.
If we assume that CO2 was the sole cause of warming in the last 130 years and nothing else was going on, this would imply that a doubling of CO2 would cause a rise of 1.6K. Temperatures rose by 0.8K while CO2 rose by 42% (Which is one half of 100% in a logarithmic relationship. If CO2 concentrations rise by another 42% you have more than doubled the concentration). The climate models of the IPCC claim that a doubling of CO2 will result in a rise between 2 and 4.5K, with the most likely value being 3K.
Taking this at face value, this means that the IPCC claims that there is a natural process at work that would have cooled the world by about 0.6 ... 1.2K in last 130 years, if it wasn't for CO2 emissions, which counteracted this trend. Then again, all climate models and predicitons the IPCC put forth failed to predict the stagnating temperatures of the last 15 years.
If climate models are incapable of predicting short term developments, then certainly the predictions in the IPCC reports should have as many scenarios predicting that global temperatures cool down over the next 10 years as there should have been scenarios showing a rising trend over the next 10 years. None of the former exist. If the claim that climate models can't predict short term changes is true, then climate scientists certainly don't act as if they believe this claim. Because in this case, they should have had many scenarios included in the first, second and third IPCC assessment report predicting a stagnation or decline in temperatures in the first decades after their respective release.
Whatever those "scientists" in the inter GOVERNMENTAL panel on climate change claim (for those are politicians or people who act as politicians, certainly not as scientists), has been in bad faith. They use their claims of uncertainty to hide their mistakes and to defend inflated claims of the capacity of CO2 to cause global warming.
How about this guy:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Asbeck
And the austere little hut he calls his home:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Remagen,_Schloss_Marienfels.jpg
You may now proceed to delude yourself into thinking that Germans would have spend over $500bn on "renewable" energy (that will be a large heap of trash after 20years, when state-mandated funding runs out), if it hadn't been for the frantic claims of climate disaster that saturated media for the last decades. And that noboby benefits at all from any of this. Least of all farmers who managed to convince the public that food should be burned as "bio"-ethanol and "bio"-diesel, while at the same time being cheered and applauded.
If that is all you can muster, the argument must have been a good one.
Oh. Would you care to point me to the hoards of level headed climate activists who say this about Hurricane Katrina or Sandy?
You're misunderstanding how science works and what the claims were. You make a prediction (e.g. pumping loads of extra energy into a chaotic system will cause more extreme weather) and you then look at the new data to see what it does to your hypothesis. Each data point will do one of three things:
The scientists you are referring to are saying that they have more data points in the first category when these events happen. They don't conclusively prove their hypotheses (but then, that never happens in science), but they do lend it some extra weight.
If we assume that CO2 was the sole cause of warming in the last 130 years and nothing else was going on
No one is claiming this. There's a reason why these models take very large compute clusters to run: they have a huge number of variables and input data from a very large number of experimental inputs.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The trouble is this explanation may well be correct, but when we hit a minimum ice level like last year it's ZOMG TEH GLOBAL WARMIN! But when it's not something that supports AGW then it's just weather.
Can't have it both ways
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Yes we can.
2007 was an exceptional year for ice melt, a 1 in 1000 event. In a stable climate we wouldn't expect to see that record beaten for ages.
But just six years later we saw that record broken. That tells us that either there is a trend in ice extent (there is) or, alternatively, variability is increasing (also generally not a good thing as most living things need a fairly stable environment to survive) or both.
Even after the exceptional rebound this year, we're still one SD below the long term trend line. Things are not looking good in the arctic at all.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
It only "matters" when they melt.
Yeah, and if Hitler were alive today, he'd probably be a "Warmist" as well, what with his vegetarianism and long walks in the woods.
Give me a break.
This whole Slashdot discussion today, based on a Daily Mail article, seems to be mental preparation of the public so that they're properly revved up for global warming denialism,
before the next IPCC report gets published in a few weeks.
So that on 2013-09-27, Joe Public will say to Jane Public: "but it's all rubbish; wasn't that in the newspaper a few weeks ago?".
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
DERP INTERNET Is there an invisible army of retards on /.
such that trash like this gets marked funny on any article about warming?