nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/ Artic Sea Ice Extent is tracking at the bottom of 2 standard deviations below the last 30 year trend. It is melting very fast. When you add that to what is happening in Greenland it may be game over soon.
out of curiosity...what is "game over?" if Greenland and Antarctica are melting so fast and ocean heat content is rising so quickly...why have multiple studies come out saying that sea level rise is constant? Where is all of the water and the heat going? OHC should be causing thermal expansion and Greenland and Antarctica's purported meltoffs should be adding volume to the oceans as well. Where is it?
that means more farmland up north and less near the equator. Potentially closer beaches to DFW as well! But maybe a dearth of humidity here so the rivers will dry up.
nsidc.org/cryosphere/quickfacts/icesheets.html Mop, here is some info on ice sheets. Game over is when we reach the tipping point at which nothing we do can reverse the ice melt and subsequent sea level rise that will follow.
Now this is interesting and directly relates to the original post. So 2012 was the lowest Arctic Ice extent on record, but 2013 actually recovered quite a bit and was only the 4th or 5th lowest. But as we have all recognized and said many times in this thread, volume is a far more helpful and useful number. The trouble is that volume of ice is still a fairly hard piece of data to come by. So what I prefer to do is to watch the areas of multi-year sea ice. Those years have been slowly growing over the past few years, 2012 notwithstanding. So I have been wondering if one of these years we would see a good leap forward in sea ice extent as a natural consequence of multi-year sea ice growing and therefore thicker ice being more plentiful. Now, it is WAY to early to say, but it is interesting that the model runs currently being utilized are suggesting that this year will be one of the largest sea ice extent years in the past 10 years. I am FAR more impressed with actual data, but when the same people who have been predicting an ice free arctic are now predicting a relatively high year of sea ice, that gets my attention. If their prediction turned out to be correct, then 2014 would be above the average sea ice extent of the baseline 2000-2010 and would be halfway to the 1990's average sea ice minimum for September. Once again, this is ONLY a model and I want to see the data, but it is at least interesting.
for the record, 2012 the NOAA's prediction was WAY off and that ended up being the lowest ice extent on record, so this is a VERY preliminary posting. I just found it interesting that in the midst of so much alarmism and overstatement, one of the chief offenders is predicting a large ice rebound this year. But they could be wrong like they are wrong about most things.
With the recent Bengtssen affair, it is interesting to read prominent climate scientists admitting that there is tons of politics involved in climate science which is suppressing the discussion. Judith Curry, the chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology is a well known "luke warmer." By that i mean that she believes we are partially to blame for warming, but feels it has been overstated and politicized. she brings up some great points in this recent blog: Judith Curry's recent blog
ha! no, of course not. And now 2012 has come and gone and, while it was low, we did not melt off then either. But last year was a fairly significant rebound as it was only the 6th lowest on record. This year MAY be higher than that, but we will see.
So this year is shaping up to finally be the new "hottest year on record" in 2 of the 4 indices. I think it would be more interesting if it was in all 4 (still a possibility but less likely). Of course, this will give us screams of "it's worse than we thought!" but the truth is that the pause has been for a solid 15 years and this new record won't at all make up for 15 years of no warming. If it is followed by a strong La Nina, we could see it statistically erased. On the other hand, we have been warming for 160 years or more, so warming a bit more is not a surprise and is well within historical and natural norms.
So what you call climate change I call it the weather. Can't believe this is still a topic. I guess the weather is suppose to be the same everyday every year. They can't forecast the weather in a week, but we are suppose to believe these scientist that gets grants of millions of dollars to show the world will burn up. Morons!
worry not I35. the supposed "consensus" on climate change will soon start unraveling in a very public way. Already the alarmists have overreached by claiming "97%" over and over when this is a demonstrably false and dishonest figure, but as the pause stretches ever onwards I believe many scientists who are privately skeptical will become emboldened to speak their minds and to pursue studies that demonstrate their position. My only "concern" is if we set a new global temperature record this year (highly possible if not likely with an El Nino coming on) then many will proclaim for the umpteenth time "it is WORSE than we thought!!!" but of course that is absurd. A new record at this point looks to only be in the ground based measurements and not in the satellites so it won't be a record in all 4 like 1998 (the last unanimous record) was. But even if it WERE in all 4, that would mean that it took 16 years to surpass the previous record. That does not fit either the models or the projections and fits quite nicely with living in a world that has been warming for 170 years coming out of the little ice age. Regardless of all of that, it will no doubt be followed by a La Nina which would statistically nullify any upwards push that the higher temperatures of this year and next year caused. What that means is that in about 2-3 years we may STILL be looking at a 15-20 year pause in all 4 indices which will certainly pour some water on the enthusiasm for ever rapidly increasing global temperature claims.
Just for fun, I decided to graph global temperatures in the 4 major indices since this thread started. I chose 2008.5 as this thread started on June 27th, 2008. global temperature graphs since July 1st, 2008
it is interesting to see that the prediction of an Arctic minimum that is MUCH higher than last year's surprising rebound from 2012 may be starting to come true? WAAAAY too early to tell for sure and I am thinking that they are overshooting by a good amount since volume is certainly way down over the past 10 years, but a divergence is beginning to register with previous years as it follows last year's early days... 30% Arctic Sea Ice graph
The funny thing is that this is all that the warmunists have going in terms of actual empirical data. Nothing else has changed in a way that could not be more simply explained by natural causation. So if the ice comes back in the Arctic, their main argument will fall apart.
yes, there is the hurricane problem (alone with the sea level rise problem, the tornado problem, the drought problem and the flood problem), but we have one of the longest streaks on record of not having a major hurricane hit the states ("major is defined as category 3, 4 or 5).
The storms rolling through Austin now must be AGW based. There was a tornado! I thought I had escaped the threat but I just farted and made the situation worse.
currently, sea ice is tracking with 2005 and 2006, but that's not as impressive as it sounds because 2013 was actually even higher than that at this point. Should be interesting. We have about 90-100 more days of melt, but of course, the daily melt will steadily decrease starting in August....
