In clarification, I would use this line from a meta-analysis, "Girls and women often outperform boys and men on tests of verbal fluency, arithmetic calculation, and memory for the spatial locations of objects. In contrast, boys and men often excel on tests of verbal analogies, mathematical word problems, and memory for the geometric configuration of a route or environment." Basically if there is a difference I think it is more likely that men and women can achieve similar results but maybe through different faculties. If this is true then the over-representation of males could be caused by a preference for male-advantaged modes of thinking and reasoning amongst teachers and academia that biases alternative modes. Woman can do anything men do but if there are sex differences then they may just do it differently sometimes.

Well it is at least uncontroversial that men are generally superior at visuospatial abilities and that those often color the results of many studies depending on how tested. The problem with the variance question is that it shows up consistently but that it is near impossible to eliminate the confounding factors of test design and the theory underlying the tests themselves.

China is the only country that had the easy access to coal but the canal based trade infrastructure was already far superior to early railroads that I wonder if the steam engine was ever much of a possibility. I always think about the difference between maritime development in Europe contra the Ottoman Empire. The mass of cheap labor left a large amount of the resources tied up in galleys where more specialised transport was required by Europe. Also I think westerners under-estimate their poverty before the steam engine. What year did Europeans become wealthier than China and Mughal India let alone much of the Ottoman Empire and Persia? 1700s for the low countries maybe. I also find the weird reliance of the Muslim Empires on slave soldiers (ghilman and mamluks) which usually became the ruling elite while staying separate peoples. They were mostly Turks and Caucuses peoples although sometimes Nubian early on. This biggest what if to me in world history is and will always be when and that would have happened if Möngke Khan had lived another decade or declared a successor who could have maintained the unity of the empire. Would Subutai have ground Vienna to dust? How much of Europe would have been subjugated by the overwhelming force that was the Khans. Would Hulagu have continued to sweep away the forces arrayed against him. The Mamluks never had to face the overwhelming forces that would have been brought in an all out attack compared to the underwhelming forces that remained free. Considering how the Mongols treated those who killed their ambassadors the death count in Cairo would have been in the 6 figures.

El Nino matters a whole lot more for the South pole than the North. The Blob and PDO though could make a difference. However, the PDO and blob effects are supposedly fairly minor compared to the massive effect that El Nino has on the various edges of the Hadley Cell. How that translates to Polar Vortex formation and collapse will be interesting. If I had to guess the effect of El Nino will more likely show up on snow cover anomalies and temperature on lower latitudes which would have a second or third order effect on Sea Ice in the Polar seas.

I feel like people are ignoring or forgetting the other big hammer that dropped in 2012 for the Beaufort. The McKenzie was stuck behind the land fast ice and when it broke the massive heat pulse of warm water melted out the highly fragmented sea ice. The gyre had ground up the surface ice and allowed the water to flow between and further into the Beaufort. The McKenzie was really cold this year and the thicker ice made me worry about an ice jam building up a warm water. There was some paper I read about ice jam floods in Siberia that suggested there was a critical ice thickness that had to be reached before a serious flood could occur. It was from the 90s and someone was looking at the historic Lena floods of the 60s when in 1963 and 1967 the Lena exceeded the discharge of the Amazon. Since the Soviets and now Russia monitor the floods and start bombing them from planes to break up potential ice jams. The big 3 Russian rivers have a lot more ice in their mouths than at the same time in 2012 from my perusal of MODIS. I expect the Lena to break through its land fast barrier this week on the very North where it has been turning much darker over the last week. I was kinda surprised as the water is backed up on the delta and is flowing North over the thinnest part of the land fast ice. Considering the high that is expected over that area this week the clear skies should start to allow some serious melting in the Kara as the continental heat from Siberia is transferred down the Lena. The On is slowly working its way to the arctic but the Yenisey is quote a ways from any serious discharge. I wonder if the late melting might be worse for the ice. The water that gets backed up is a lot shallower than the arctic ocean and builds up a lot more heat in the south. Once the land fast ice breaks the water that has warmed in the stronger Siberian sun is going to flow right into the Russian side of the arctic and melt a lot of ice before it can mix with the colder waters already in the arctic. June is when it all starts to happen and I'm really curious how this year will turn up.

I'd try to post on the forum but I can never seem to create an account and am thus relegated to lurker status. So ignoring my fear of going too off topic I wanted to ask a kind of general question. Is it a personal flaw of mine that in some weird way I root for a serious sea ice decline? Like with many natural disasters there is a certain morbid curiosity that I want to satisfy. It isn't that I deny that global warming is one of the chief tragedies of our modern age. The obvious death and destruction of more sudden natural disasters is missing and so I hope to see an extreme outcome purely from an interest in extreme events.

I see a lot of talk about ENSO here and on the forum. From what I've read there should be some caution about assuming the heat released into the atmosphere will have any specific effects on Arctic ice. My understanding is that ENSO has much much larger effects on Antarctica than the Arctic. It also takes months and months for that extra heat to make its way to the poles. The one study I saw suggested a very slight influence on ice on the Russian side of the Arctic in n+1 ENSO years. The question that is open is how much the broader warming trend of the Earth is masked with ENSO noise. The general slowing of warming seems unlikely to persist as the heat stored in the west pacific is redistributed throughout the globe moving us back towards the longer trend line. The question there is how much do you truly attribute to ENSO and how much do you ignore the periodic nature of the ENSO noise on global heat.

My question is whether the storm can disturb the upper freshwater layer. If I remember correctly the GAC 2012 shunted the freshwater from the Russian rivers towards the Bering and stopped the replenishment cycle that keeps the saltier water from the bottom of the pack. It may not stick around long enough to cause significant bottom melt.

Looking at worldview and rewinding back in time that chunk seems to be shelf ice and not myi.

Just a lurker here, but if I remember the Washington study right it wasn't only the Ekeman transport but that the Beaufort gyre reversed and shunted the fresh water runoff from the Yenisey and Ob was shunted off towards the Bering and not to the central arctic. This destroyed the fresher lens of water that kept the warmer saltier deeper water from the bottom of the pack. Since it was already significantly later and warmer this had an increased effect than a similar storm would have had earlier in the season. The problem with comparing eimilar events to previous years is that in such a dynamic system the effects of hysteresis are overwhelming. The current states are so wildly divergent from previous years that long term predictions seem foolhardy. Of course they are also fun and interesting.