"You admit that we have had similar blocking patterns before but your observer bias just will not let you go beyond your stagnant conclusions." Strawman argument. Not to mention completely untrue as I never admitted any such thing. I responded to your unfounded assertions: "Deep low pressure North Atlantic systems are quite common" and "The gist that folk are trying to somehow link blocking patterns to climate change. Funny how we've only really become aware of them since we've developed the technology to be aware of them." So prove them. Provide a link to a reputable source which documents that "Deep low pressure North Atlantic systems are quite common" and that blocking highs were as common before said technology as they are in the 21st Century. Heck, even compare the 20th Century frequencies to the 21st. It is the abiding hallmark of fake-skeptics to make unsupported assertions that they then not only cannot backup with links to factual sources but then to become agitated when challenged to do so. Fake skeptic ye be, lest you man up and provide said evidenciary proof for ye position.

Karl prosecutes an iteration of the fake-skeptic meme "it's happened before" (currently the number 1 most-used denier meme). "The climate's changed before" is used to imply either that it must always be natural, or it is nothing to worry about. Responding to "therefore it must be natural": The logic here is that climate change happened before mankind, therefore mankind cannot affect the climate. By the same logic: people died before cigarettes were invented, therefore no deaths can be caused by cigarettes. Responding to "therefore it's nothing to worry about": The logic here is that climate change harmed no humans when humans weren't present, therefore it will harm no humans when we are present. By the same logic, I wasn't there when Chernobyl exploded, therefore I'm immune to radiation. Fake-skeptic fail.

Llosmith57, to make your links from MS-Word work, try putting a space on either side of the URL, i.e., ( http://www.wetterzentrale.de/topkarten/fsecmeur.html ) Failing that, you can try using html tags to post the link (posting tips are here).

Just wanted to share some SkS author community thoughts on Goelzer et al 2012: 1. The authors hinge their best-case projection from the perspective of the year 2000, with CO2 concentrations at what appears to be ~360ppm and following a predicted trend that's clearly not going to happen; by the year 2012 where we sit the concentration is already off-scale for the "preferred model version," meaning the "preferred model version" has no demonstrated connection to reality, is in fact demonstrated to be wrong from inception. Plainly stated, the IPCC concentration scenario employed by the authors in the "preferred model version" was wrong and is useless for these purposes. 2. Here's a major problem with the paper - the Antarctic barely responds in the modelling, whereas in the real world Antarctica has shown very dynamic behaviour in every interglacial. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet has essentially disintegrated during interglacials, making it the largest contributor to sea level rise during previous interglacials. 3. But the biggest problem in the paper is this: "Uncertainties of the ice sheet projections also arise from poorly constrained physics in prescribing ice-sheet mass balance, basal sliding conditions, and the effects of oceanic erosion of ice shelves and calving fronts. Such limitations are thought to be less crucial for the Greenland ice sheet than for the Antarctic ice sheet, but were not investigated further with the current model setup." The dominant mechanism for mass-loss in marine-terminating outlet glaciers, calving at the terminal front, was not investigated for the WAIS. Thus, any attempt to use this paper to prosecute a claim of "It won't be that bad" is simply appalling. The study is an interesting proof-of-concept modeling exercise, but little more.

Actually, I think Bob may have had this one in mind: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iesXUFOlWC0

If I could beg Neven's forbearance for yet one more OT post, this video showing all nuclear explosions from 1945-1998 is very sobering: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=LLCF7vPanrY

To paraphrase the good Doctor: "We have become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds."

Even if Nares & the various outlets through the CAA amount to but 20% of total ice advection, the vast majority of that ice advected out those pathways will be multiyear ice. Making it the equivalent of another Fram. And thus a factor of significance.

@ kris "I wonder who might have created the "6 m maximum" stupidity." Not having been able to keep up with you guys (d*mn frickin' day job!) someone may have already addressed this. So pardon if this is redundant. I think this is a conflation of supraglacial lake depths vs sub-glacial lakes. Krawczynski et al 2008 looked at constraints on the lake volume required for hydro-fracture through ice sheets (i.e., supraglacial lakes). What they found: "We find that the cross-sectional area of water-filled cracks increases nonlinearly with ice sheet thickness. Using these results, we place volumetric constraints on the amount of water necessary to drive cracks through 1 km of sub-freezing ice. For ice sheet regions under little tension, lakes larger than 0.25–0.80 km in diameter contain sufficient water to rapidly drive hydro-fractures through 1–1.5 km of subfreezing ice. This represents 98% of the meltwater volume held in supraglacial lakes in the central western margin of the Greenland Ice Sheet." And their conclusions: "Our calculations show that lakes that are only
250–800 m across and 2–5 m deep contain a sufficient volume of water to drive a water-filled crack to the base of a 1 km-thick ice sheet. Lakes that are smaller may also be drained, however it requires fractures that are fed by multiple basins. This range in lake sizes represents the majority of supraglacial lakes in the ablation zone along the western margin of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Thus we propose that a large fraction of the melt water produced in the summer (on the order of several cubic kilometers) could rapidly reach the base of the ice sheet via this mechanism."

Agreed with Lodger on Eisenmana & Wettlauferb: a sobering read, indeed. Chris R, as for Maslowski's peer-reviewed/not peer-reviewed status, there is this: The Future of Arctic Sea Ice (Open copy here) Wieslaw Maslowski,1 Jaclyn Clement Kinney,1 Matthew Higgins,2 and Andrew Roberts1 1Department of Oceanography, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California 93943; email: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] 2Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado 80309; email: [email protected] Annu. Rev. Earth Planet. Sci. 2012. 40:625–54 The Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences is online at earth.annualreviews.org This article’s doi: 10.1146/annurev-earth-042711-105345 Note that full disclosure for Maslowski is likely difficult due to the proprietary hardware (and possibly software/code) used to run his model. The US Navy takes a rather strict view on security classifications.

Wayne Kernochan nails it (Gillis over Revkin), every day that ends in "y".

Apologies for not posting this with the above comment (I blame early senility): Horizontal velocity field of the Ryder Glacier. Contour interval is 20 m/yr (cyan) for velocity less than 200 m/yr and is 100 m/yr (blue) for values greater than 200 m/yr. Red arrows indicate flow direction and have length proportional to speed. [Source (Scroll down for even more on Ryder Glacier)]

Per Howat and others (2008), Ryder Glacier accelerated by 300% over a 7 week period following drainage of a supraglacial lake in 1995. This indicates the ability of an unusually large sudden discharge of water can increase basal water pressure dramatically and enhance basal sliding. Ryder Glacier has an order of magnitude less melt than Jakobshavn and would be more susceptible to such a sudden meltwater pulses. Perhaps this melt season's discharge in North Greenland was greater than normal? ;)

I believe Andrew meant 80N. Though I've been Poe'd before...

You guys are tempting my idiom. One I could ignore, but two Dr Strangelove references...makes me drag this out: http://youtu.be/RLPnnPHkIuc Or was it Ground Control to Major Kong?

According to R. Gates' linked image, we're gonna need a bigger Arctic... (cue Jaws music)

Thanks, Steve, for that Dai paper. Yes, it's a really big deal. And not in a good, Pollyanna-esque way.

Transit history of the NW Passage: 3 up to 1950 around 155 from 1951 to 2000 at least 120 from 2001 to 2010 Detailed here: http://www.skepticalscience.com/StRoch.html

Alternatively, they could be artifacts from the stitching process used to merge the satellite swaths together. Something to watch, in any event.

Neven, am in agreement with Lodger. Using his referenced imagery, clouds on ice lighten the tone of the false-color red for the ice. The feature in question is darker in tone, similar in tonal coloration to the ice striations running in the bedding of the ice tongue parallel to the direction of the flow of the ice. Since the feature runs perpendicular to the direction of flow, it is reasonable to conclude it to be an area of potential calving.

Meh. Me mouse is double-clicking things instead of single-clicking. MS POS.

How nice, posted twice! (Typepad is fubar)

Steve, Dana gives a pretty succinct read on AW's gaffes (comparing uncorrected Time of OBservation data to corrected data, for example). Even the reviewers at E&E can't give this one a free pass. Major "own goal".

Steve, Dana gives a pretty succinct read on AW's gaffes (comparing uncorrected Time of OBservation data to corrected data, for example). Even the reviewers at E&E can't give this one a free pass. Major "own goal".

And for their next "paper", they will prove the world is actually flat after all. http://instantrimshot.com/classic/?sound=rimshot