Well the French may have messed up naming Lake Superior a bit, but they got the Grand Tetons right :)

My apologies to CB. I did not mean to sound harsh I just figured he did not know about the Forum and he is a great fit there with his posts. Guess I was short of coffee and not operating at full efficiency yet.

Garethmabn "...It really is not my intention, I had hoped to have a reasonable discussion on the issue of climate change science debate,..." "Neven I really don't see why reasonably polite posts are considered to be trolling?" Politeness does not mean you are not trolling. Anyone who has been following the science of AGW for any meaningful amount of time knows the difference between what appears on WUWT and what the actual scientific data says. They are also fully aware that there is no meaningful debate on the science. Thus any time someone pops up on Skeptical Science or here who brings up the nonsense used at WUWT to question the science is going to get an abrupt response. If you have been around you have no excuse not to know the status of the science. If you don't know the status of the science you will get directed to the beginners sections of Real Climate and Skeptical Science where you can learn all the reasons why WUWT and their allies have not come up with any new counter ideas in many years and why all their counter ideas do not hold scientific water. The philosophical discussions of the AGW debate took place years ago and are long settled. To try and rejoin them is a standard trolling tactic as is promoting any one of the dozens of counter arguments disproved many years ago. If you truly are so new to these discussions that you are not aware of the above then please take yourself to the beginner sections and spend some time reading up before you jump in like you have done. We enjoy this no more than you claim to be and would appreciate not having to go through it all the time (you are hardly the first to approach the discussions this way). Alternately, if you are not new to these discussions then you do fit the definition of troll like behavior and should not complain if you are treated as such. JimD

Garethman "As someone with a background in qualitative and phenomenological study my main bugbear with climate science is this reductionist black and white thinking. It's a plague in the science well illustrated by WUWT on the one side and Skeptical Science on the other." Your minimal claim to authority above is pretty thin compared to the norm on this forum so don't be too upset when it does not carry much weight. Your apparent lack of authority, or ability to perform logical thought processes, is well demonstrated when you consider two sources equal when one of them is incapable of getting even straightforward science correct while the second has a long track record of being able to explain even the most difficult science successfully. Such obfuscation is a hallmark of the denier camp. The plague you refer to is not as you state, but is instead demonstrated by your attempt to portray non-science and science as opposite sides of the same coin. Did you perchance used to work for the folks who were paid to tell us that tobacco is not dangerous? Or do you still work there? JimD

Hi, I don't normally post in the blog much as I don't feel I know enough to add to the conversation when we are talking about the specifics of the ice so I just read here and hang around over at the Forum. However, I have a comment/question today (which will probably show why I don't post here much). It relates to Lord Soth's comment. "Looking at the DMI North of 80 temps for the past 56 years, I would say this has been the coldest arctic summer (North of 80) in the past 56 years. I don't have any elaborate theories, I believe it is just natural variability...." Kevin seconded this comment. But doesn't this metric need some further discussion beyond being automatically attributed to natural variation? There have been untold numbers of discussions over the last few years about how 'weather' events have been juiced by AGW. Just in recent months we have had extraordinary cold and rain in many parts of the world (US Midwest a couple of times, US south, Russia) as well as extreme heat and drought. Many of the discussions related to those events have focused on how climate change is strongly influencing those extreme weather events. Does it not follow that the very unusual cold temperatures north of 80 deg could also be significantly influenced by the very unusual weather patterns being generated by our rapidly changing climate. Some of the wild fluctuations away from historical norms will actually not be to the hot, wet and dry sides of the records but occasionally (rarely) to the cold side as well. Does this make sense? JimD

SH, Your hope for such a silver lining as the north warms is s common one. Unfortunately it is often also used by the camp of folks who subscribe to the belief that such new northern agricultural areas will offset the loss in the temperate regions and that we do not need to take action now. Unfortunately the ground truth says that it will not work out that way. There are several factors which will prevent it from working to our advantage. Among them are: The soils of Canada and Russia are not the high quality loams required for extremely high yield production (not to mention that they amount to a lot less acreage). You could not get American midwest production out of them even if they were located in a proper latitude for high production. Which, of course, they are not. Other issues you will have to deal with are the freeze and frost problems. Even with a warming climate you will not get as wide a range of frost free days as you would farther south. And you would still get the occasional early/late season unexpected cold snaps that would hurt production. There is no substitute for a long string of warm frost free days if you are trying to grow on a vast scale. One cannot replicate the micro climate found in the valley in Alaska where they grow the giant cabbages across the whole arctic. Lastly, the amount of sunlight available during the growing season, for the various vegetable plants we grow, at high latitudes is not what the plants evolved to expect and this will in many cases not be optimum either. Another item, not related to latitude, is that studies have shown that as CO2 levels rise the overall productivity of our food plants will decline not rise. And, if you run into one of the folks who think that we will feed everyone by a vast network of hydroponic greenhouses just ask them where they are going to get the resources to build and maintain them. Hydroponics are like industrial agriculture on steroids.

Ponter. One of the reasons is that any vegetation which is higher than the snow level catches the sun more directly due to its being perpendicular to the level of the ground. Plus all vegetation is dark and has a low albedo. Thus it warms very fast compared to its surroundings. You see this effect at any time of the year when the temperatures near freezing in the direct sun. There will be significantly greater snow melting right around the bush or tree. Sort of like a hole in the snow. This results in the ground around the vegetation becoming snow free much sooner than nearby areas that have no vegetation and it gets much warmer. The bushes and small trees then grow much quicker and have a tendency to spread faster. One of those amplifying feedbacks that we are always talking about. I have seen pictures of places in the arctic taken of the same location about 30-40 years apart and there are small forests now where there used to be bare tundra.