Thanks to all for the discussion.

Color Eli skeptical. Not that there are emissions from the ice shelf, but rather that they are not of the magnitude that Shakhova claims. Looking at the SCIACHAMY column density it appears that the major emission in Russian Eurasia is from the middle of Siberia north China and the SE Asia rice paddies http://rabett.blogspot.com/2013/11/eli-and-weasel.html

Be cautious about "methane" bubbles from clatherates. First of all they may only be partially methane, second considerable methane will be solvated on the way to the surface and thus turn into oceanic plant food. There are studies which show that methane and petroleum leaks in the ocean increase plant production (for example near the Deepwater Horizon blowout)

Heck, even Eli behaves here:), must be the frigid atmosphere. A well earned congratulations from all at Rabett Run

Anyone remember the coasts of Greenland being so ice free?

Or let the currency inflate a bit more. See Iceland

This is more about the treeline moving north than greening from ground plants. Trees far up in the new northern forests will be evergreens. The needles will contribute to warming throughout the year, both in absorbing sunlight through the spring, summer and fall, but also in insulating the ground during all seasons.

Really well done. thanks

Eli hopes that everyone realizes how this ties in with the pursuit of Charles Monnett by BOEM. Monnett's leaking of BOEM documents to PEER caused a minimum of a four year delay in Shell's drilling in the Beaufort and Chuckchi Seas, that cost Shell a pile of money. If that was not enough, he blocked Shell from setting up a shell environmental study of the Arctic in place of a real one.

Allow Eli to contribute

Sam, the damn things are going to get buried over the first winter and floated in the spring. Limited usefulness.

""There is very high confidence that climate models realistically simulate the annual cycle of Arctic sea ice extent". Because I don't think there is, really." Now some, (Crandles for example), but not Eli might think this a useful metric, given that the Mayans might be moving the Earth's orbit using time machine technology in preparation for a plunge into the sun. The Bunny, OTOH, would be much more interested in how the freeze up and break up days in various places (Hudson's Bay, etc.) are changing.

One of the interesting things about clathrates is that a) the collapse does not have to be over a short time and b) a fair proportion of the methane will be solvated into the sea water and then oxidized. There is at least some work on that, although the estimates of the immediately threatened clatherates on the coastal shelf may be low balled

First as with all the others a wish for a well earned holiday. Yes the Arctic ice situation is out of control, but in such a chaos it is best to wait and see when nothing is to be done Second, exposing Eli to the crowd, a wild assed guess. With the compaction (everyone booed and hisses when the bunny wondered">http://rabett.blogspot.com/2012/08/toujour-gai.html">wondered whether there would be any ice south of 80 N, but it is going to be close), the refreeze is going to be very fast north of 80, and very slow south, as there is no floating ice to keep the top layer relatively fresh and cold. It's going to be a two step, with the first being cooling the upper layer down well below O C.

Federal and state government employment hides the large number of contractors hired from body shops to do the necessary work. Given the local nature of the hiring it would be essentially impossible to characterize the numbers.

If you get a hummer, everything looks like a Niall

Bellemisc it really depends on how dirty and chopped up the ice is.

;(

Kind of late to Jimboomega's party, but one of the things that is important is that the ice outside of the Arctic Ocean has declined precipitously over the winter, so if you want something to look at, how about the odds of Hudson's bay not freezing over completely. As it is, ice in the Baltic, except at the extreme northern end is now rare. That ice is captured in the various sea ice area series.

And Neven quibbled when Eli proposed a simple bet. Still time to get your markers down for the Rabett Run Exacta.

wrt the Bremen maps which Eli has featured for a long time at RR, can anyone get them to kill the white for ~ 98%, it makes absolutely no sense visually to go from deep purple to white to a lighter purple. They could slot in a deeper shade of red, btw red and purple. Also the dark green and the lighter greens need to be shifted about to make the scale more intuitive. Where is Tufte when you need him

Another effect is that the saltier water from down below has a lower freezing point. Coating the ice with that stuff will result in serious melting as in throwing salt on your sidewalk.

The interesting thing about 1997 was the shift out of a (mostly) annual cycle with slightly colder winters and warmer summers than the baseline, as shown in the sea ice anomaly, to a steep and fairly even decline in all seasons. Then in 2007 so much of the old ice was wiped out that we got the strong annual cycle. The freshening of the sea from the melting ice new ice must be contributing to the rapid, shallow freeze. That explains the extensive refreeze this winter.

It is an old tradition in forecasting that when your model is in error consistently in the same direction, you apply a statistically derived correction to it (e.g. if your model was always 1 unit low, for forecasting you discount by one unit). This neatly captures the difference between trend analysis and modeling in purpose. The former is a pure forecast, the later seeks to understand the system, the two together provide the superior forecast because each captures things that the other misses. It looks like Arctic ice is one of those cases. Oh yeah, people may be using different definitions of ice free:)

Eli may have missed when someone wrote it above, but FWIW a major reducer of energy absorbed at high latitudes is the angle of incidence. At glancing angles the amount of reflection from surfaces goes to 100% (this makes it possible to reflect x-Rays)