Kevin - 'defect' indeed, thanks!

Reading about the research stations on Arctic ice floes and it's dangers always reminds me of this action/spy novel Target 5 from Colin Forbes. It's about a Russian scientist based on a floating Russian research station who attempts to deflect to the nearby American research station Target 5 with important information across the shifting Arctic ice floes. It mentions a form of fog called 'black fog', a form of deep chilled fog which allegedly freezes instantly anything it comes in contact with. Luckily for researchers and adventurers this type of fog is only a fantasy.

We don't need to frame it as a supply OR demand problem, it's both. Agreed, when there is no demand then there is no supply, but when demand is high and supply is restricted then prices must go up and demand is reduced (or less increased). So it's not only a question of reducing demand, which we very much need to do. How do you get 7 billion people to agree? We also have to put in place strict limits on supply. The case for Arctic oil is a clear example: only 3 or 4 governments need to agree on banning all fossil fuel exploration up there and *bam* all those GtC will not enter the world's markets and not released into the atmosphere. But ofcourse I know; both won't happen any time soon, the users and suppliers are both addicted as are the regulators. We're doomed.

In previous open threads people wondered why the FTP site with AIRS methane data/maps was unavailable. Someone contacted Dr. Yurganov, he replied that the ASL site was obsolete now and that updates are kept here.

Don't take the septics too seriously Neven, we need people like you around for much longer!

Peter, in case of the combined Greenland and Antarctic ice sheet 5 m is clearly not out of reach for exponential linear increase to continue throughout this century. Antarctica has such a large coastline and volume that ice wouldn't need to speedup c.q. melt in-situ much to maintain the speeds required by 2090. I wouldn't dismiss scenario's that Hansen deems plausible with a slay of hand. Do some calculations and explain why it's physically impossible.

RobPMurphy, you're right, I was too kind and should have put 'error' between quotes or worse.. Thanks Seke! :wink:

On September 6th Bastardi predicted a jump in sea ice extent and ice rapidly growing back in 10 days. Well, 10 days have passed and we see a further decline in sea ice extent. I guess Bastardi made a simple sign-error which seems common among septics, is it not Dr. Christy?

Bastardi's prediction of a big jump in extent within 10 days was posted on the 6th, so by Sunday we will know how his predictive skills hold out against reality.

Chris Alemany, here's one of his Twitter posts about ice growing rapidly back.

Re how much waterpressure can an icesheet withstand? Isn't the collapse of the Antarctic Larsen & Wilkins iceshelves attributed to meltponds working as wedges opening cracks from the top of the shelf to the bottom? Because water is heavier then ice, water works much like a peg splitting wood; pressure at the tip forces an existing crack to widen. Water seeps down newly formed cracks which increases the column of water and thus increases the splitting force at the tip. The splitting will continue as long as the meltpond is replenished while water is seeping deeper into the shelf. When melting on the top of the sheet stops then the waterlevel in the meltpond lowers as the crack deepens and ice-collapsing-forces on the crack will come in balance at some point with the pressure of the watercolumn and the crack will stop progressing. It might even refreeze. If melting continues there is not much to stop the watercolumn to reach the bedrock. See e.g. http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/WilkinsIceSheet/ Because of this mechanism I find it hard to believe that a deep glacial lake can be sustained for any longer timespans.

Goddard is a rotten island calved from the Watts glacier that drains the denial cap of lala-land. :D

Any guesses about drowned polar bear sightings after this storm? Or is government pushback strong enough to make observers, especially those on government payroll, look the other way? You'll all remember the witch hunt on Dr. Charles Monnett -after his notes on drowned polar bears sightings in the wake of a storm were picked up by Al Gore- don't you?

You know, it's a low synoptic Arctic hurricane cyclone storm thing, or LSAHCS for short, prononced as: El-saks. ;)

While we're passionate and look for things that perhaps aren't there and others are passionate in not looking for things that are there, the ice pack never cared at all. It just melts. (freely adapted from Henry Pollack)

... and the science to the scientists.

I guess you better leave the speculating to the speculators...

Statistics is a great tool, but physical causes are better. When Greenland gets hotter you expect more Summit melt occurrences, no matter how often it happened in the past.

"Yep, the ground stays below sealevel all the way into central greenland basin. Similarly for ilulissat glacier" Holy cr*p! Someone better send in the autonomous robot submarine that was used on Antarctic PIG glacier to survey how far the ocean is intruding below the glacier... Yes, it's always 'someone' else, but I hereby volunteer to join the survey! I can do the dishes and vacuum the quarters to make myself useful. :p

Voyageur, I've asked the same question a year ago and Larry promised to expand on the physical choices for a Gompertz curve in the following post: http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2011/04/trends-in-arctic-sea-ice-volume.html

After one of his great public lectures on quantum mechanics, in which he explained how physicists understood the properties of atoms with an accuracy in the order of a 15 digit number, Richard Feynman was asked if he thought his theory was going to be proven wrong at some point. Feynman answered that, although he could not see beyond the event horizon of scientific knowledge, philosophically speaking, every scientific theory at some time had been proven wrong but that quantum mechanics was the best tool available at the moment to describe how everything works. This day (or more exactly:yesterday) could go into the history books. Have we have witnessed the defeat of Feynman' greatest achievement? This late sea ice maximum surely disproves the known quantum mechanical properties of CO2, right?

On the other hand, if these papers are correct and there really is a teleconnection between iceless seas in the Arctic and bitterly cold winters in lower lattitudes (e.g. Europe) then we're in some serious shit. What would happen if these (small still) reductions would increase seriously? Unfortunately we have a large percentage of old badly insulated homes and rising dependencies on Russian gas for instance...

Yes, it's reading the blogs that brought it under my attention. I'm a bit skeptical though. Looking at the Uni-Bremen sea ice maps I see big changes between 2005, 2010, 2011 and 2012 when we had cold snaps (in otherwise not extreme cold winters overall). 2012 is obviously an outlier, but 2011 has a lot of ice there (compared to the other years) and 2010 wasn't spectacular either, while the theory of these papers relies on big high pressure systems building above large areas of open ocean. I simply don't see it. It's worth checking out though...

There's a new paper from R. Jaiser, K. Dethloff, D. Handorf, A. Rinke, J. Cohen discussing the climate teleconnection between low sea ice area in the Barentz/Kara seas and cold winters at lower lattitudes (e.g. Europe): "Impact of sea ice cover changes on the Northern Hemisphere atmospheric winter circulation" Afaik, this is the second paper that discusses this teleconnection, the first one being this well known paper from 2010 by V. Petoukhov and V. Semenov. Might be of interest here.

Twemoran, I think they are acutely aware of that in Norway and Denmark since a massive depression just passed.