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Wayne, one vortex, two vortices. Four subvortices in the Vortex. I don't see the problem.
Talk about unprecedented
In the preceding post on Global sea ice minimum records getting broken for the third year in a row, I mentioned how the situation on the Pacific side of the Arctic was quite unprecedented, with the sea ice graph for the Bering Sea showing a sharp downturn (and even a small one for the Chukchi Se...
Peter Principle.
Lowest maximum on record (again)
After a drop of almost 262 thousand km2 in just three days, it looks highly likely that the maximum for sea ice extent was reached two weeks ago, according to the data provided by JAXA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (via ADS-NiPR ; it used to be provided by IJIS). It's a new lowest maxi...
I regret that this thread has been largely hijacked by vidaloo and other cyclemongers. I just want to join the many people thanking you for this blog and wishing you a good sabbatical. (And an unburnt return.) This is one of only four blogs I follow (with Hot Whopper, Skeptical Science, and Arctic Sea Ice News). I also hope that guest bloggers can jump in and do some of the heavy lifting you've been doing.
Sabbatical (I hope)
I've alluded to it a couple of times already, but I'm really going to take a break from blogging, as I have been struggling with an Arctic burn-out since 2012. On the one hand it's caused by everything that has been and still is going on in the Arctic. The learning curve, the excitement, but mo...
Going back to Tim's post: a fourth reason why the right is so much worse than the left is that their party's delusions about climate are far more dangerous than Democrats' delusions about GMOs or vaccines or whatever.
Arctic sea ice -- in pre-election perceptions
As longtime ASIB readers may know, my colleagues and I have been tracking US public perceptions of Arctic change. This started with analysis of questions written by others for the nationwide General Social Survey in 2006 and 2010, then shifted to our own questions placed on another nationwide su...
Not possible. The maps also looked crazy; the Antarctic one was almost psychedelic. The graphs are now fixed but the maps still have problems--big gray wedges.
PIOMAS August 2015
Another month has passed and so here is the updated Arctic sea ice volume graph as calculated by the Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS) at the Polar Science Center: As I wrote last month: It all depends on the weather in the coming weeks, of course, but according t...
What surprised me about the reaction to the reversibility paper was that Watts was so confident in his misreading that he quoted material from the press release(?) that directly contradicted it. Is this SOP for WUWT? I never visit it but it was one of the top Google hits on Arctic sea ice so I thought I'd take a look.
Waves, phytoplankton and reversibility
I've got some bad news, some more bad news and some good news (maybe). Here are a couple of science articles that caught my eye the past couple of weeks. The first one is about waves and how it's easier for them to hurt the ice pack now that sea ice has thinned so much. From Scientific American...
navegante,
I responded, let us say, forcefully, because your original notes struck me as typical denialist crap. But no self-respecting denialist would ever admit to being wrong.
However, though you might be not be a denialist, you are still missing the point of the posts you replied to: climatologists do not force their models in order to account for Arctic paleowarming. They use the fact that they can't reproduce it without forcing as an impetus to improve their models so that natural inputs give accurate outputs. Which is what you want. And A.D.'s paper is an attempt to use information from the mismatch to improve.
And this is no excuse for denigrating current models. 'All models are false, but some models are useful.' With all their uncertainties, models are the only predictive climatesensitivitometers we have, and they have far better records than the denialists'. When planning for the future, we have to use the best methods we have now, not the best we'll have in ten years.
The Ns are calling the maximum
Here's a quick update on everything related to our good friend Max. In the past couple of days organisations like the NSIDC, NASA and NOAA have announced the annual event of the Arctic sea ice pack reaching its largest size at the end of the freezing season. This has been picked up widely by the...
Incredibly arrogant navegante:
What reason do you have to claim that the atmospheric composition should be 'extremely different'? Or the geodynamics?
Why do you think that you are so brilliant that you have thought of something that all the professional climatologists never thought of investigating?
Does it make you feel better to know that, insofar as climate models don't match the Pliocene, it's because they underestimate the dangers of global warming?
C'mon!
The Ns are calling the maximum
Here's a quick update on everything related to our good friend Max. In the past couple of days organisations like the NSIDC, NASA and NOAA have announced the annual event of the Arctic sea ice pack reaching its largest size at the end of the freezing season. This has been picked up widely by the...
Much as I'm enjoying the race to a possible new max, I wonder how we know we haven't already reached it. JAXA SIE says it's now 13.76 square megameters, as compared to 13.94 on Feb 15, and you say the difference of .186 is 'quite significant'. But do we really know SIE to three significant figures? SIE is determined by 15% coverage, but is that 15% or 15.0% or 15.00%? In 'Mad max?' we're told that 'IARC-JAXA (IJIS) sea ice extent grew to 13,942,060 square kilometres', which is certainly impossible precision. Basically, I'm asking what the error bars are.
Early record, late record
10 days ago I posted a blog post called Mad max. The title - referring to a very early maximum sea ice extent - ended with a question mark, because it was far from sure whether the preliminary max reached on February 15th would remain standing. This is because of the oscillatory nature of the f...
I see no sarcasm in the use of 'rebound'. By any reasonable standard 2013 was a big jump upward: about three times the size of the 2012 fall, whether by square miles or percentage, and that was big enough that people were predicting a quick collapse in ensuing years.
What 2013 was not, was a recovery: 'regaining a normal position or condition'. Denialists conflate the two, as Bill Fothergill says; that doesn't mean we have to.
PIOMAS November 2014
Another month has passed and so here is the updated Arctic sea ice volume graph as calculated by the Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS) at the Polar Science Center: The 2014 trend line is showing the same curve as previous years, which means it stays well above the ...
Does anyone else find it striking how the 2014 SIE trend line in NSIDC precisely hugged the 1981-2010 average -2SD line for all of July before lagging the last couple of days? Yeah, I don't see how it could mean anything, but it's a remarkable coincidence, and the longest straight-line drop on the graph.
ASI 2014 update 5: low times
During the melting season I'm writing (bi-)weekly updates on the current situation with regards to Arctic sea ice (ASI). Central to these updates are the daily Cryosphere Today sea ice area (SIA) and IJIS sea ice extent (SIE) numbers, which I compare to data from the 2005-2013 period (NSIDC has...
AFU, I don't see any signs of the mean dismissal that makes you sad, certainly not with regard to the Curry/Wyatt paper. People have expressed interest, have offered non-ad hominem reasons to question it, and have expressed wariness. That third point, I would say, is absolutely proper. If, like Curry, you have been spouting ultracrepidarian nonsense for years, you should not get a free pass for your latest efforts and nobody is obliged to put it as high on their to-read lists as work from people who have shown a grasp of the subject.
Freezing season 2013/2014 open thread 1
Here's a first open thread for this freezing season, which will be followed by monthly instalments. I apologize yet again for having been so inactive on the blog. I'm the kind of person who shuts off certain activities when being too busy with momentarily higher-priority stuff, but with the exte...
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