ulisescervantes I wasn't trying to diss' anyone's religious beliefs or anything similar. Rather I was trying to highlight how people with particular types of psychological makeup and value system can be deeply uncomfortable and resistant to ideas that challenge their core value system. 2 people may share the same religious beliefs for example yet bring very different psychologies to how they 'process' their beliefs. It is the underlying psychology that is the focus, not the beliefs. And it is the impact of different peoples psychological makeup on how they 'process' ideas such notions as 'our way of life is leading to a dangerous change in the climate'. 2 people may both have a deep support for the capitalist/free enterprise system and defend it strongly. However, when presented with evidence that it is causing harm, one person may come to accept that fact. It is distressing for them, disturbing, that something they cherish could cause harm. But they are able to travel the painful road to accepting that fact. The other person is literally unable to accept it. Mere facts aren't strong enough to overturn inner certainties because they have a personality that is built very strongly on inner, perhaps subconscious beliefs. For them their economic conservatism for example isn't an opinion they hold; it is their identity. And when confronted with ideas that are a challenge to their identity, rejecting minor things like evidence is easy in comparison. This difference is an issue of personality type, not political views.

Josh "Texans are different, or so I've recently learned - apparently if you say anything that suggests Texas could experience negative consequences from climate change, they take it as a personal insult - actually as an insult against the state of Texas, which is much worse than a personal insult for them. " It isn't a Texan thing. It is a thing associated with certain kinds of conservative personality types. Capitalism, Free-Enterprise, The Consumer Society etc. To some people the deep and visceral 'goodness' of these things is so profound, so deeply unconsciously real that any notion that calls them into question or suggests they may have any sort of negative consequences, or might need to be curtailed is anathema. Emotionally anathema. Probably the best analogy is to consider deeply conservative Christians. Evolution is anathema. Almost literally Blasphemy. To the economically conservative that Capitalism/Free Enterprise might have negative aspects or consequences is also Blasphemy. And ideas of blasphemy are never ever rational. But very visceral.

nightvid cole So the BG spins hard clockwise a week or so ago, breaking things up. Then across Ellesmere / Greenland it reverses, pushing towards the Fram. Is Mother Nature trying to tell us something?

I have just put some of these images up in comments on a post about Andy Lee Robinson's PIOMAS graphics at SkS - http://www.skepticalscience.com/feb-2013-sea-ice-spiral.html Neven, you might want to consider a cross-post on this at SkS, it might be a big story - drop Dana a note

Comparing the animation Neven has shown with the latest CICE animation here http://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/hycomARC/navo/arcticictn_nowcast_anim30d.gif There is an interesting possibility. CICE is showing a large mass of the remnant 4.5-5M ice having moved SW, left Ellesmere and continued on. With weak ice in the Beaufort not resisting the BG very well what are the odds that the mass ends up sitting in the middle of the Beaufort at the start of the melt season, waiting to melt.

Wipneus Thank you. It might be a week or 2 before I can get time to work on this but I will keep you posted and look for any feedback you might have. Regards Glenn

We are hoping to do a post at SkepticalScience in the next few weeks about PIOMAS and the trends. If Wipneus is out there, is there any chance we could get the eqns values for the exponential trends for each month that you put into your graph - notjust the Sept values. Hopefully we will produce an animated version of that as part of the post - with attribution to you of course. With so much of the world thinking only about the area trends - including the IPCC seemingly - the more we can highlight the volume trends the better.

Unlesssomeone has seen anything to the contraryin AR5SOD, it lookslike the IPCC is ignoring PIOMAS. Fine,ther may not be any new papers associated with it, bet then howmany newpapers are attached to GISTMP, HadCRUT, RSS etc. Let alone NSIDC etc. For some reason the IPCC authors of this section are ignoring volume. Which is the main game. If AR5 is published Sep 2013, it could be totally trumped by the SIE figures the same year - no way volume can continue on it's current trend without SIE crashing over the next 3 years. The IPCC might have egg on it's face for so wildly underestimating. That said, although nobody wants the Arctic Sea Ice tobe vanishing,I can'tthink ofanything more dramatic to grab the public's attention. The MSM will love it. All showing graphs of extent crashing. The Arctic may be the first canary-in-a-coalmine but it might also be a very loud screaming parrot as well. It has something other facets of Climate Change don't have - visuals!

Wipneus An open question. Does PIOMAS gridded volume information? Is it possible to do the sort of analysis you are doing but with regional data so one could look at the trends and projections region by region? With the likely minimum for next year removing nearly 40% of the remaining volume, the impact on Area/Extent could be huge. It would be interesting to try and separate the volume of ise in the bastion north of Greenland/Ellesmere from the rest of the Arctic. Might give a better indication of just how much Area/Extent are likely to get hit in the rest of the Arctic.

The PIOMAS anomaly graph is declining in usefulness. Their algorithm for removing the seasonal cycle is being overwhelmedby the larger swings in the seasonal cycle in the last few years. Simple take-home from all of this comes from Wipneus' trend graphs. We are totally on track for an effectively ice free late summer Arctic within 2-4 years, depending on local weather conditions in any one year. I say effectively because there will probably be a refuge north of Greenland & Ellesmere that might hold out for several years. Perhaps a useful metric of 'an ice free Arctic' is ice free everywhere except x kilometers north of Greenland & Ellesmere.Or perhaps simply an effectively ice free Arctic is one where the North Poleis ice free. 2013, 2014? Depends on the weather each year. You have to have some sympathy for the guys working in Sea Ice modelling. Still a newish field, but it is evolving faster than their research can keep up with it. Modellers in other fields like Atmospheric or Oceans don't have to cope with modelling the oceans boiling dry or the atmosphere blowing away. But the Sea Ice guys need to model the terminal phase of the very thing they are modelling.

Djprice537 Take a look at the animation of the refreeze at CT here http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/CT/animate.arctic.color.0.html Refreeze looks like it was relatively fast in the Laptev & East Siberian sea's. But the Beaufort and Chukchi are much slower.Oncethe L % ES reached their land boundary the slower rate of freezing in the B & C seems to have slowed the rate. I don't think maximum SIE is likely to drop much for quite some time - that depends on the East Greenland Sea and maybe the Bering. For Max SIE to really start to drop we wouldneed to see ice not reaching the land barriers around the Arctic. By then we will be looking at seriously less Arctic ice and ice free for many months. Has anyone heard why PIOMAS hasn't put up their figures for October yet? The shape of that curve will be the really interesting one.

The last para of the Stroeve & Barrett presentation is perhaps the most telling: "The spatial variability of thickness, a large-scale slowly varying climatic feature of the ice cover remains not well produced by the majority of the models." Yet it is exactly that aspect that is a major part of ice dynamics during the terminal phase of the Arctic decline. Below certain threshold thicknesses the ice becomes susceptible to effects that do not occur with thicker ice - mechanical events such as hsattering of the ice pack, the capacity for winds to actually generate waves where thick ice might supress it's formation, This leading to salt contaminationon the top of flows, deeper water mixing etc. If they aren't capturing thickness veriability very well - and hey, that is probably the hardest thing to mode - then they won't be able to model the effects of thin ice very well. All the things we have seen this year.

Has anyone been comparing the CT and Uni Bremen Extent Maps recently? CT is showing a huge polynya above the Laptex, with lots of 30-40% ice around it. And still expanding. And 60% ice almost to the pole above the Kara. Uni Bremen is showing a much smaller polynya and nothing of note near the pole ?? Who is right?

Just to put some numbers into perspective wrt safe levels. The previous interglacial, the Eemian, saw average temps maybe 1/2 C above the current for perhaps 2000 years, 1/2 of Greenland was lost and ppart of the WAIS. Denmark didn't exist and the rest of Scandinavia was an island. HGo back about 3-5 million years ago, to when CO2 levels were around 400ppm, the entire WAIS became unstable, collapsing & recovering over timescales of 1000 years or so. Go back further, 30+ million years ago when the East Antarctic Ice Sheet began to form. CO2 levels then where around 600 ppm. However if we take account of the weaker output from the Sun in the distant past, the comparable level today is around 520 ppm. At current emission rates, that is about 50 years from now.

Here is another domino, if anyone has been keeping records: Most Northerly Polynya ever. That hole north of the Laptev looks to be centered at around 86N and it ain't going away.

Just a heads up for those who haven't spotted it yet. PIOMas have released early; data up to just Aug 25th.

Don't ever forget, Christy (and Roy Spencer) are signatories to the Cornwall Declaration. After one christian evangelical group came out declaring for AGW, this declaration was another group opposing it. Essentially they state that AGW cannot be true. God wouldn't allow it. He has the right to his religious beliefs. However, as a consequence he should recuse himself from all involvement in science. At the very least he should preface just about everything he says with "Of course, these aren't my scientific views. I am expressing my personal religious beliefs here..."

While Neven's away, the mice might play I have an interesting speculation. Looking at Wipneus' graph of PIOMas data for each month over the satellite record, we can see the obvious declines. However, something else strikes me, applying a high accuracy, mark 1 eyeball. If we factor out the significant decline in volume in 2007 due to particular weather circumstances, and perhaps push 2007 up a bit to what it might have been without the special weather, what do we see? From around 1998/2000, the curves (at least for the warmer 1/2 of the year) are showing a fairly strong and steady correlation with an exponential/geometric type trend. Whereas the 2 decades before that bounced around quite markedly. It is as if the Arctic was only playing around with melting until the turn of the century. Then around the millenium, it decided to get serious about it. It sure looks like (using a high powered eyecrometer) that somewhere around then there was a state change. What triggered it? Surely t couldn't have been the 1998 El Nino - that seems like too big a stretch. Then what? Or did the Arctic just reach a tipping point? But it didn't happen this year. It happened over a decade ago. Thoughts!

Bob Wallace. Thanks, thats really cool. Will be good to see what it looks like by october. 2007 may have been the big year for areal measures but 2010 sure looks like the break out year for thickness. A real regime change of some sort. Interesting too, it bottoms out in late October, not September. So while refreeze is starting to lift the area metrics, total volume is still decreasing - presumably bottom melt in the warmer regions.

Wow Chris. Cool data. Although that particular graph is a little hard for people to parse who don't really follow the ice. However...What would be really cool is a graph, along the lines of the extent and area graphs, of average ice thickness over time. That seems to be the one missing piece in the arsenal of graphs.

One more number that will come out while you are on holiday, and bound to be a record as well. PIOMas.

Have a good holiday Sadly, I think it will be the other way around. The western world won't get serious and mature for a while yet, although loss of the sea ice will be an extra prod in that direction. On the positive side, Sea Ice will be one of the earlier facets to recover when CO2 levels are eventually lower. Sure going to recover quicker than land ice sheets for example.

One comment wrt the slower change in maximums area/extent. Since the Arctic is largely landlocked, this puts an upper limit on what the maximum could be. Until the winter warming has progressed to the point where the maximum is no longer reaching right up to the surrounding land, we wouldn't expect the maximums to drop much. But once the winters are no longer cold enough to refreeze the entire arctic ocean, then the maximums may start dropping more substantially. Currently the drop in maximums seems to be primarily to a decline in winter ice in the Barents Sea, possibly due to warmer currents coming up from the south. The only other areas that, to date, might be showing any similar change are the Bering St and Sea of Okhostk. But if warmer waters start pushing further, on into the Kara or even the Laptev, that could change maxima significantly

Maria It's more likely the other way around. Warming of ocean currents that travel up to the Arctic is a significant part of what is causing the steadily increased melting. The Gulf Stream is a part of this system of currents but it is further south. There is the possibility that adding more fresh water to the arctic (sea ice is still fresh water) may cause a slowdown of a process called the Thermo-Haline Circulation that drives all the worlds currents, including the Gulf Stream. Some years back there was concern that this circulation may have been slowing due to extra fresh water being added to the Arctic; not just from melting sea ice but also from large increases in the flow from rivers in Siberia. But at present the evidence for this slowdown is very small.

Earlier, folks had asked the question "When would the MSM take an interest?" Answer. When the North Pole is essentially Ice Free. The Arctic doesn't have to be but the Pole does. What they will respond to is visuals. Images from ships or planes at the Pole showing no Ice. "The Year Santa Drowned!" Give the that and the MSM will be all over this like a rash. So as the melt season proceeds, if that starts to look like even a modest possibility, start getting the word out. Your local politicians, Media, social networking sites. Peak melt season is 6 weeks before the US Presidential Election. If Mother Nature obliges by giving us a spectacular collapse (what a sad world it is where one might hope for that as a spur to action on climate change), we all need to be ready to prime the MSM/Politicians to be aware of it.