The orange line represents NSIDC’s “normal” line. Green is 2011 ice not present in 2007. Red is the opposite.
More than 30% of the missing ice area in the western Arctic has recovered since 2007. This is one of the most important indicators that the Arctic is “recovering” but it is unlikely that you will be hearing much about this from the experts.
If the Arctic continues to recover at the present rate, it will be back to NSIDC’s “normal” by 2020.
Decline is climate, recovery is weather. The silence is obvious since they are only interested in climate
If they are only interested in climate they are living a lie! Because their definition of climate is a lie!
The lie is letting the very people who are saying it’s abnormal…
…..define normal
Their normal line is what is not normal….
The Russians have ports that would not be useable if it was.
Normal is: Variable ice conditions within a range that has been defined over the last five thousand years!
NORMAL is NOT a single number, no matter how it is defined! That would be abnormal!
I know I “Cherry Picked” 5,000 years. I picked that number because that is when cooling became most evident in the records. Some show 8,000 as being the tipping point and it may well have been. It appears that at the 5K year mark the globe went below the optimum range of temperature and the Holocene Thermal Optimum ended! Just my Opinion!
Warming and loss of ice is a recovery to living conditions. Ice gain is a reduction in usable area that requires massive amounts of pollution to attempt to clear paths for shipping through.
The only reason I would cheer a gain in ice is that it would prove Chicken Little wrong!
The entire Arctic sea ice thing is absurd because all it shows is that ice conditions change. We should have already known that! Wind direction changes the configuration of the ice! We should have already known that! Ice melts when exposed to the sun! We should have already known that! Ice forms when the water gets below the freezing point! We should have already known that!
How many millions of dollars have been spent to verify what we should have already known?
Chicken Little got me started this morning!
If you look at their normal line…..stop and think about normal variability…..then the Russians would never have sea ports there.
That is only obvious to people that do not listen to the Ice Watchers!
I plumb forgot! The Russians put those ports there before historical records began to be kept! BSE: Before Satellite Era! They just did not know the locations would be normally ice blocked!
Who you gonna believe, hundreds of years of human observations or the 32 years of computer aided graphics roughly based on satellite monitoring?
….Lat touches nose with finger…and winks at Mike
So you are saying that the Russians have ports established some time ago that are now unusable? That is interesting. I’d be interested in finding out more about that.
translation for the severely reading impaired….
No Andy, I didn’t say they are unusable now…..
I’m saying that the Russians are not stupid, and didn’t build ports ~75 years ago where they were unusable when they built them.
AND…if you look at NSIDC’s “normal” line, and account for normal weather variability, there would be years that the Russians could not use their ports.
Andy, point is, they built those ports before the invention of icebreakers…..
…because they didn’t need ice breakers when they built the ports and probably because they didn’t think they would ever need icebreakers in the future
They didn’t even know what icebreakers are………
Now they need icebreakers………..
I found this an interesting read, you might too….
http://www.arctic.gov/publications/AMSA/history.pdf
I read the article. Very interesting. Navigating the NWP and NEP is nothing new, as alarmists would have you believe.
…You have to think, Russians did not build ports they could not get to…..before icebreakers.
It’s sorta hard to explain a 100 year old port in the Arctic ocean, and then claim there is less ice, when they need nuclear icebreakers to use that same port now.
I wonder how much yellow ice is forming beneath some of those alarmist arctic forecasters?
I’m looking forward to adding this September to my graph. I think it will be telling, concerning a recovery.
It will indeed. Even if you discount Bremen, every other metric has the 2011 minimum as the second lowest on record. That doesn’t look like a sustained recovery, it looks like a failing recovery with the danger of continued losses to come. Just like most of the economic graphs out there >.<
I'm sure Steve will now call me a moron and point to the various graphs showing a sharp rise over the last few days. Let me in return point out that even after the said sharp rise, the ice is still worse off than 2008 for most metrics.
Julienne said here the other day that there is more MYI than 2008. Given that the area is about the same, we can pretty much figure that PIOMAS is a crock.
Peter, by any metric in this world….
second lowest is better, not worse
Peter, I’m not sure by the end of Sept it will remain to be so. JAXA has ice extent as just about dead even with 2008 and ice area is even with 2008 and 2010. As does Norsex. Even Bremen is showing a rapid acceleration of ice growth in extent. http://www.iup.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr/ice_ext_n.png
We’ll see, I guess.
Is your nickname ‘Eeyore’?
Peter Ellis:
How many years have you been repeating the same line at the end of Summer? Maybe one day you will get it right. Law of averages and all that. Possibility of 56years if the oscillation continues at 60 years. However with the quiet sun we may not see these conditions until the next interglacial in about 120K years. If the weather remains some what stable as it has for the last couple of hundred years, with minor oscillations, I would place the 2007 minimum reappearing somewhere between 56 and 200 years from now!
Of course it is all computer generated graphics loosely based on satellite observations any way. Just SIM City at the poles!
Mike, we don’t have enough satellite data to even know if this is un-natural……
As far as we know, what we have right now might be the normal amount of sea ice……..
Basing it all on whether the NWP is open or not is stupid….
I agree with that. Historic records point to periods of less ice and periods of more ice. With the long term cooling trend the globe has been experiencing for over 8 thousand years chances are we will not see this reduced amount of sea ice any time soon. There is evidence of past double periods of optimum weather during an interglacial with a cold dip interjected. The globe mat well follow that pattern as the patterns are not set in stone.
It is just a wait and see game but it has turned into a virtual reality game rather than real world observations.
Anything greater than 15 / 30% equals 100% is virtual reality!
“Julienne said here the other day that there is more MYI than 2008. Given that the area is about the same, we can pretty much figure that PIOMAS is a crock.”
Steve recently said that the icecap is 4 times thicker now than it was in 2007. So let’s see, if it was 7 thick in 2007 it should now be 28 feet thick.
Given that the area is about the same we can figure out what the real crock is.
You are a moron and a liar. Find the source of your claim and post it.
I’m waiting Terra.
Wow, I’m pretty sure that’s a 100% lie and he knew it when he typed it. IIRC, Steve actually considers the remaining ice in Sept 2007 to be quite thick due to compaction. Then most of that ice got flushed out over the winter which is why 2008 was so thin. Thus, even if what you claim he said was true, he would’ve said it about 2008, not 2007.
Of course, I’m pretty darn sure that what your claim is untrue (though would be interested to see the quote if it’s true), so none of the 2007 vs 2008 stuff even matters.
-Scott
Well, Steve didn’t have this blog back then……… but, it doesn’t escape notice that he didn’t immediately post the source.
Drive by trolling, they never tire of it.
He said “recently said”, which I interpret as this year. Until he posts a source I’ll consider it a lie. It’ll be fun to watch how this plays out either way.
-Scott
Terra Incognita – still no source for your claim? Fine…I will consider it a 100% lie from this point on. Please prove that wrong if it is so.
-Scott
Ya, that’s what blogs like this one were proclaiming in 2008 and 2009 when the Arctic ‘recovered’ and was clearly on its way back to normal!
And then 2010/2011 happened and we are back to 2007 levels, except this time it was *not* due to extreme/unusual weather/wind patterns, but simply an abundance of warm air and water and greatly thinned ice.
Newsflash: A steady decline over 30 years is still a decline even with a few bumps in the road! Deal with the REALITY, we are melting the summer-time Arctic!