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.