Sadly I'm not a betting man.  I'm guessing that I would have got fairly good odds on the Arctic Ice Area dropping below 1M SQ KM this summer.  Even if it is way below any analysts projections even today.

 

Today I can't get odds for even that wild supposition.  Way, Way too much melt going on.

 

So what does that tell you?

 

Things are much worse than they seem would be my take!

It’s been a really cold winter you know, colder than for a very, very long time.  It means GW must be a hoax, look at all that extra ice out there in the Arctic!  Look China, India, the Middle East and Turkey have all had incredibly cold winters with much snow.

 

The Heartland institute tell us it’s because the AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming, or to make it longer, “Us who are warming this planet up”), stories are a plant to get more taxes out of us.

 

It’s not warming up.  Noooo, It’s getting colder.  Can’t you tell it was a super cold winter.

 

Somebody find me a sickbucket.

 

Why, oh why, does the weather of the world have to correspond to the observations of the US.  Yes it was a cold winter.  Exactly that, One Cold Winter.

 

So what was happening in the rest of the world whilst America, China and the Middle East were deluged in Snow and Ice?

 

Well I suppose the Scandinavian countries would not be of interest?  Nor far north western Russia?  Or most of Europe?  I guess not.

 

Why?

 

Because Scandinavia didn’t have a winter this year!

 

Run that by me again?

 

Norway, Sweden, findland, the Baltic states and most of Western Russia simply didn’t have much of a winter.  France and Poland had the warmest winters since records began.

 

If we go further north and west and up to the northwest passage, the heartland of the “Cold Winter” country, the Arctic Ice around Banks Island was open for hundreds of KM.  Yes open water in the middle of the coldest winter since “way back when”.

 

OK, so when we stop cherrypicking the results we want o see, what happened?

 

Well it seems that the Eastern North Atlantic, this winter, was 3 DegC warmer than usual.

 

OK, so what caused that?

 

Well we don’t know right now, but if you cast your mind back to the very late re-formation of ice last year; you will note that the reason stated was that the sea was circa 3 DegC warmer than usual at that time.

 

It would appear that the crust of Ice on top of the sea only kept the energy locked in and it has migrated over the winter to keep Northern Europe warm.

This would then lend credence to the IPCC position that Arctic warming will replace the Gulf Stream as the warming factor for Britain and Northern Europe during the winter.  In fact it seems to be doing a better job overall.

 

Personally I wouldn’t want to be a shareholder in a winter tyre company in Europe right now.

 

So what is the Ice doing in the Arctic now?

 

Well the heartland institute would have you believe that it’s thicker, stronger and more extensive than at any time on the last decade.

 

Is this true?

 

Of course not.  The current ice is thinner than at any time since our records began.  Except, or course, inbetween Greenland and Canada.  There it is approximately 20CM thicker.  What does that mean?   Absolutely zip because that Ice melts Every Year and so it will be lost in this years summer melt.

 

Another 30% of the thicker Old Ice was flushed out last winter leaving a very thin rear guard of Ice to cope with the 2008 summer.  We are talking 2-6M ice being replaced with 40-60cm ice.  A little bigger difference than the relatively small growth of 20cm extra annual Ice.

 

And what is it doing?  Well you need to understand the difference between:

 

Extent

Area

Volume

 

The main figures are given in Extent.  It is the main marker and is used extensively.  Ice Extent is considered to be any area of the sea covered by 15% or more Ice.

 

Sometimes the figures are given in Area.  Area is only the Ice with ALL sea areas taken out.  So when the Extent figures were given in 2007, they stated 4.0M SQ KM.  YET the Area figures were 2.9M SQ KM.  Given all the focus on albedo (the ability of Ice to reflect sunlight and the open sea to absorb it), I would have thought that only Area would have been used.

 

Almost never until this month have I seen a Volume figure.  The volume is the Area x tickness.

 

So what is happening?

 

Well the Extent is reaching back to 2000 levels.  Yes I said 2000, not 1997 or some such other figures.  Not that you would guess that from the heartland institute.

 

The Area is falling fast although it did recover to 2004 levels.

 

The Volume is falling even faster as the thick Ice is flushed.  Also right now the concentration of the Ice over nearly 50% of the Arctic is less than 100% with huge leads of open water and massive “patches” (thousands of SQKM) of mixed broken ice and open water.

 

What does this mean in real mans terms?

 

It’s melting, pretty damned fast and dramatically, but we can’t see it in the stats yet because the extent was so large this year.  But it is melting in places where it was solid at the end of last summer.

 

This happened in 2005/6.  I had a very pessimistic stance on this blog last year at this time.  Why was that?  Because I had taken the overheads from the 2005 minimum ice and the 2006 minimum ice.  I overlaid them and noticed that some 1.5msq km of ice had (changed places) and the perennial ice which melted in 2005 was replaced by annual ice for the 2006 season and new areas of perennial ice had melted in 2006.  So although, technically, 2006 was a lower melt year than 2005, in actual fact the Amount of ice (volume), lost was significantly more.

 

So where are we going?

 

Well I was beaten to the post this time by a Norwegian climate scientist.

 

Where we are going is here:

 

IF we have a summer of equivalent heat and radiance (low clouds) as we did in 2007, in the arctic this year, then we will functionally (I don’t count less than 1mSQ KM), lose all summer ice in the Arctic this year.

 

I shall be watching.

It's been a while since I blogged about the state of the Cryosphere.  However it's been an interesting time.  Virtually NO ice in the Swedish Baltic Arctic Circle.  Basically No winter for Stockhom.  I do mean NO winter.  They don't count the odd day at -1 and the odd flurry of snow as "Winter".  They talk about 5 months with below 0 temperatures and lots of -15 to -20.  So no winter this year.

 

The reports from the Arctic have been varied and interesting.  Bering straights with 100km open ice polynias.  Old Ice moving at high speed and flushing out of the Arctic.  Vary sparse cover with many areas less than 100% Ice.  Relatively warm temps (-17 to -24 instead of -40) which mean the ice is not thickening in the same way.

 

We still have the March high point to come, but we are moving into the Feb meltback right now and I wonder what March will bring?

 

All good clean fun.  After all, if you don't know it's coming then you can't prepare.

 

Oh and on that point, the scientists recorded a 1.5 meter loss of Ice in Greenland during the melt last year.  Which is somewhat "significant" but you won't hear them talking about it too much right now.  Not till they can prove a trend.  But the thing is, by the time you can see the trend, you are already so far in the shit you can't do much about it.

 

Oh well, as any married man will tell you, it's only the depth that varies....

It's interesting to read the news on the current catastrophic melt going on up in the Arctic.  You get so many  conflicting accounts which are reported so independently that it takes a little reading through.

 

I have been reading reports today that the Ice has thinned by 50% in the Arctic because it is almost universally no thicker than 1M.  Now I know it's thinner at the borders but extensive surveying shows that it's no thicker than 1M in the perennial Ice.

 

The perennial Ice was 3M thick or more.  So we can deduce that at least 55% of the Ice Volume has gone due to thinning.

 

Then we read that in 2005, the Arctic lost 20% of it's ice from the norm of the previous 20 years.  This year we read that the Ice Area dropped by 27% from 2005.

 

OK so my maths is a little crap, but it goes like this.

 

Area is the square mileage of the Ice over the sea

which has thinned by 55%

and reduced in extent by 47% (2005 minimum minus the 27% drop this year)

 

47% of 55 is 26 (rounded). and 55 -26 is 29.

 

OK this is not exact because some of the ice is thinner at the edges.  However, not much nowadays and I gave it a 1Meter leeway in perennial ice lost which I didnt count.  Otherwise I would have been taking 47% from 33 which would give us 11.6% of the Ice Volume remaining.  Which is significantly scary.

 

That means that we have only 29% of the average Ice Volme that we would have expected to see in 1979.

 

Given those figures, who would be surprised to see the Arctic Ice vanish completely in the Summer of 2012?

 

Very much a case of lies damned lies and statistices in the framework of a compartmentalised scientific community.  So what do we do?  Book a cruise to the North Pole?  Sit and watch with a beer and a smile?  Or do something constructive.

 

Ah but Doing Somehting will take money and energy.  Lets just get another beer.....!

Well we hear what I've been seeing for the last 9 months. The melt is unprecedented and huge. The Ice is not growing back in Winter and is melting faster and faster in the Summer.

 

So why do the scientists state that this is a combination of issues which are "unlikely to recur next year".  Did they get that much ridicule last year when the August temp cooled?

 

Was it not these same scientists who told us that the affect would be cumulative and that it would go in jumps which became self reinforcing?

 

So why, when we see a clear jump, is it put down to coincidence?

 

Do these scientists want to be taken seriously or not?  Just because this didn't happen to IPCC timescales, doesn't mean it's not happening.

 

So what has to happen now?  Does the Ice have to fail to grow back in the winter in the same scale as it is melting in summer before we hear that it is  pattern?  Does the entie polar cap have to melt *Before* the scientists "predict" it happening?

 

I dispair.....

So it occurs to me that the guy in the movie is trying to sell us a bill of goods.  Then why does he miss out all of the good bits?

 

After all, if we dol all that we need to do for GW to protect ourselves, then column A will also contain the wollowing Even IF GW isn't going to flood us out:

 

I read this article http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=21299 with some interest.

 

In the journalistic trend of trying to balance opinion and get a differing point of view across in the debate on Global Warming, this article is a very mild piece of rhetoric.  Unfortunately it can have catastrophic effect.  The time to ACT is now.  The time to give ourselves "time" is now.  not when we have no more time and we are fighting both the environemnt AND our own populations running around like frightened sheep.

 

The statement "It may only be a matter of time before another cooling trend comes along. " is inexcusable in the current political environment.  Why?  Let me explain.

 

After 4 years of near drought in France, with deparments which were looking at standpipes and farmers restricted to the water they can take from the ground, the French government decided that it was, perhaps, time to act so that more water could be conserved.  However the weather broke and we got 4 years of rain in 18 months.

 

Why is this important?  Well because the French governmetn has decided not to make the changes to conserve more water as the "drought" is over and we have had them before haven't we.  Sound logic?  Well actually not.  Because if you get into this situation again and the drought is 8 years, not 4 years, then whatever steps you take After 4 years, there will not be enough water to refill the new facilities with water.  Meaning that the population and environment we live in has to suffer until it rains again.  We have the technology to fix this problem today, however we will not because the money could be "better spent elsewhere".

 

So in the terms of Global issues, the time to act is now.  Things are beginning to happen 50 years, or even 100 years, before predicted yet the governments still dither.  Tell them that it "will all return to normal someday" and they will wait, either for "someday" or until it's too late to DO anything.

 

The only thing you can be certain of is that Government won't suffer.  We will make sure they have all the food, shelter, water and comfort they need so that they can "govern" us.

 

So let's just remove all these "sensible" journalists and get on with what we know needs to be done......

 

I haven't had a good rant about the environment and the fact that we're doomed (well anyway things are out of our control right now), for a long time.

 

So what have I been doing?  Well apart from working I've been thinking and observing.  Plus making a few comments online on a few blogs.

 

So what have I been observing?  Well I have been looking at the arctic and monitoring, on a daily basis, to see what is going on.  I started with a look at the NSIDC cryosphere page on the 2005/6 winter ice growback failure and followed it with the summer monitoring that nsidc did and also spent the winter monitoring the ice reports myself.

 

The result was startling.  I started with this report http://www.nsidc.org/news/press/20060404_winterrecovery.html and then kept monitoring the daily sea ice pages here http://iup.physik.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr/amsre.html over the winter.

 

The 2006/7 winter was unbelievable.  The winter ice started anther month late (given the 2005/6 winter record this was really late) and it never really settled all winter.  The ice was breaking up and melting in patches all winter.  Something it did not do in 2005/6 really.

 

The scientists who monitor the ice were somewhat disengenuous in April when they reported that 2006/7 was the second lowest on record.  Apart from a sudden growth of ice for 3 weeks in March, 2006/7 was the lowest hands down for the entire period.  Plus if you look closely, they drew a line around the ice edges, but the ice was broken fractured and subject to sudden melting. As is happening right now.

 

In April, the ice suddenly started to melt all over.  Something not seen before.  Yesterday and the day before that turned into a warming rout which is breaking up the ice wholesale and allowing the seawater to melt the ice sheets.

 

So was Google being topical or high handed?

 

IMHO they were taking a humerous swipe at a very serious problem which is being played down by the very scientists who are being ridiculed with their "predictions of doom".  The real think tanks are talking 10 years, not 40.  My own personal take is that the pole will be open water this year and the northwest passage will be open for most of next winter.  That not only will the pole be open water next year but the perrennial ice will shrink faster and faster each year with almost clear arctic conditions in the summer by 2012.

 

Well that's me stuck my neck out.  Let's see if the environment chops my head off or not....