Fragmenting Arctic ice shelf a sign of warming temperatures

Last year there was a record melt. All year the media was screaming about how that meant the end of ice in the Arctic. Every fool with global warming grant money was predicting a worse melt this year than ever before in history. Guess what? It didn't happen. There's significantly more ice now than there was last year at this time.

Satellite pic comparing July 29 2007 Arctic ice pack to July 29 2008 ice

Graph showing progression of 2008 melt against 2007's, and 1979 to 2000 average.

And the Antarctic continues to get colder with the largest sea ice extant on record.

I found myself wondering how is the media going to explain this - how one more in a lengthening line of their half-baked, BS, hysterical prophesies didn't come true. Here's the answer I guess. They'll just ignore the fact the predicted, increased melt didn't happen. Instead they'll point to something which happens every year like another ice shelf fracturing off, and claim it's some new dire emergency.

How much higher can they pile this global warming bullshit before people start to notice something stinks?

The ice that used to build up in the cab of the cat I was running up there last year will just be melting now.The ice on the lakes is 10.5 feet thick and melts off in late july. August is summer in the arctic,by late september you will have winter back.

For us who have lived there,we laugh at this stuff.
we also keep up on enviro Canada's weather sites and they go back to 1946.

All the stats you could possibly need about the weather in 5 minute intervals.
all recorded and on the net.
I have allmost 70 video's on youtube from the arctic.

60 kliks from the arctic circle and for one month we were stranded at camp the only comm. we had was with the mars reseach team on Devon island. They also recorded everything and put it on youtube. We hit - 80 that month,a new record.

Heres what x-mas looked like this year. minus 64 in this pic,my hands were froze solid by the time the cam clicked.You wear a skidoo suit 24/7.

Fucking cold.Life in the Arctic is a blast though.You have good days,and you have bad days,mostly bad but you learn to work around that.

It may be back to 'normal' from the record melt last year in the acrtic, but that hardly indicates Arctic ice is not declining.




What's interesting is that in these discussions you almost always see the Northern Hemisphere data, but not the Southern Hemisphere data. The graph above actually shows a (slight) increase in ice extents in the South and a more significant decrease in the North.

Now, using some Guerrilla math for the sake of comparison, a 0.9% increase over one decade in the South and the 13.8 million square km average gives us an increase of 124 thousand square kilometres in one decade. In the North, the trend is -3.4% and the average is 12.2 million square kilometres, giving a decrease of 415 thousand square kilometres.

Looking at the fairly linear trend since 1979, we're losing about 291 thousand square kilometres a decade. That's an area a little less than the size of Italy.

edit: since samsquanch isn't around these days, someone else is going to have to step up and make some ignorant comment about the use of "anomalies" in the graphics above.

I guess the snow in Austrailia is proof of global warming too?

Nope..but Climate change.

Nope..but Climate change.

Anyone who know's their geology knows that climate change is a regular thing.

The sediments like tree rings show this.

If things go the way they have for the last hundred million years then Canada will become tropic,palm trees will flourish and swamps will be everywhere.
Barring a meteor impact which would bring about the equivalent of a 100,000 year nuclear winter the tropical climate will continue untill the climate changes again and the next ice age rears its ugly head.
Then desert and dust storms will be Canada's landscape for a few million years before it starts all over again.

Every tropical period will produce a coal seam as the trees and swamp get buried in layer after layer of dust.The rock splits or stringers in the coal seams show exactly when a meteor or some other thing blacked out the sky for a million or so years,disrupting the tropical climate.

Sedimentary layers are like tree rings as each layer is deposited in seasons or years.
Mother natures climate change graph for all to see.

Graph anomalies, no. I will however take issue with the idea graphs show the totality of what's happening up there.

A NASA study showed the Arctic Oscillation shifted last year. Satellite imagery clearly shows the Pacific Decadal Oscillation shifting to it's cold phase this year. These ocean oscillations happen in cycles. A recent study suggested ocean effects could explain 70% of recent warming. Some say more. There is no evidence pointing to CO2 forced warming as the smoking gun responsible for the recent arctic melt. There are however many possible natural forces which may explain it.

Ocean oscillations.
Soot blowing North from the more industrialized Northern Hemisphere.
Winds blowing large fragmented ice chunks south preventing buttressing on the larger packs.
Volcanic activity.
Cloudless skies.
High solar activity with ocean lag.
And after all that natural force stuff, perhaps even a tiny amount of greenhouse gas irregularity.

In 1942 the RCMP schooner, the St. Roche sailed the Northwest Passage twice in a single year from either direction. After that the arctic cooled. The Northwest passage refroze. Recently it warmed. This happens. Increased melt, then refreezing happens in cycles within a much longer warming trend coming out of ice ages.

Again though, here's the thing. Last year we saw a record melt. It was suggested this meant the ice had thinned to a point from which it could not recover. The suggestion was this proved an arctic warming which would continue from that point to a time when we would see an ice free arctic. This year however Mother Nature disproved that. There is more arctic ice now than there was last year at this time. Significantly more.

That's the story we should be hearing from the media. They made loud pronouncements concerning what happened last year, and what was supposed to happen this year as a result. They were wrong. We don't hear about it. Instead we see stuff like snazzy little animations showing the melt from 79 to 2007. It's a lie unless you tell the whole story.

Minus 80!!! That is crazy. Cooldest I've ever been is minus 46. And I thought that was pretty damn cold.

But why not? If CO2 concentrations have actually increased from about 280 to 380 ppm in the last little while, and if carbon dioxide is indeed a greenhouse gas, why can't we detect its influence on temperature? This is something that the sceptics, in my opinion, have yet to contend with--or at least those sceptics who claim no influence from CO2 (which, in the scientific community, is a tiny subset; most "sceptics" are just scpetical about the bounds of uncertainty and the catastrophic nature of climate change).

Saying there is no measurable change in radiation (in the from of temperarture, for example)from a 25% increase in CO2 globally is a finding that bears some scrutiny, in my opinion.

That looks super cold, ziggy. I'd lose a nad up there for sure.

Which study? edit: found it.

Anyway, the longer-than-normal expected stage in the Arctic Oscillation would certainly serve to explain the downward trend we see (I didn't attempt to explain it), but my point was that nothing miraculous has happened over the course of one year - that sort of rebound in ice levels has happened before (for example, look at the graphic I posted and compare 1990 vs 1991, or 1995 vs 1996 in the Arctic), and yet the trend has still been downward.

It's a little early to start proclaiming the melting trend has reversed based on one year's data.

True, but the point made was the media puts out bogus information such as a stress on a localized fracture of an ice pack to distract from the fact the predicted increased ice melt from this year to last didn't happen. Neither fact totally proves much.

Speaking of the "trend" though, I find it's importance varies in your eye depending on which graph, or data set you choose to put forward. I saw yours. Check these ones out.





You'll also find little bits of info such as...



http://heliogenic.blogspot.com/2008/04/sea-ice.html

Now are my graphs, or bits of information more accurate, or important than yours. Personally, at this point I don't care much. I would however make the point if one set has importance, the other should be present. Putting forward one set as the final word is a lie. There is debate as to what should be stressed, and even the accuracy of what is put forward.

Suggesting the totality of what is happening up there is fully known, as to cause and effect is not true. Therefore using it as motivation for large political policy movement is a mistake.

Also the media BS factor of the certainty they lay claim to just plain bugs me.