Wednesday, May 05, 2010

Sea Ice: What Will Denialists Say Now?

According to satellite data from the Japanese, Arctic sea ice extent is right now lower than at this same date on 2009.

How will science denialists, who were so eager to use such data just a few months ago to insinuate that global warming was over, react to this new data? As usual: by acting puzzled and by slicing up the data every which way to wonder what could possibly be wrong with it....

They just never learn... but then, learning isn't really what they're after.

3 comments:

Cthulhu said...

When it gets to the point that they can't find excuses for it anymore, they change the subject to some other short-term trend that is convenient to them.

Unfortunately all the short-term trends aren't convenient for them right now.

Remember during 2008 they had global temperatures, the lack of sunspots, pause in sea level rise to talk about.

But currently they can't play global temperature given it is so high.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1990

The solar minimum spin is also becoming more and more a dead story for them. Although WUWT did play the 10 days without a sunspot story about a week ago.
http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-SORCE-2008-now.png

Sea level rise is a gonna for them too.
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/current/sl_ib_ns_global.jpg

And it isn't winter in either hemisphere, so they don't really have any decent weather reports to make a meal out of.

Anonymous said...

I'm not so sure I would be so fast to gloat over a bit of faster ice melt at the start of the annual melt season. Every summer the Arctic melts till ~September 15 before regrowth to about March 15. It held out longer this year into April before the annual melt began. The Arctic is coming off an El Nino season and the Arctic Oscillation Index is negative, so I expect a fast melt at first.

As the PDO goes negative and the El Nino reverses to a La Nina this summer, next winter's ice growth could easily supercede the ice accumulations over past three years, especially so if coupled with a positive AOI, and not withstanding the variable potential of Katla and other volcanoes worldwide.

The variables are many. I don't see how an educated and truly objective science-minded person could call the annual summer melt season (or levels during the melt season) as indicative proof of global warming -- just as it may be too early to announce the earth is in a cooling cycle because of precipitous ice growth over the past three years.

At the bottom of the earth, the Antarctic ice extent is 1.4 million sq. km greater than it was 30 years ago (concentration 1.3 million sq. km greater), and overall, world sea ice is close to the same as it was 30 years ago.

The "pause" in warming and sea rise may not be a pause, but indicative of the end of a cycle.

Hank Roberts said...

Own goal, anonymous. Didn't you get the updated talking points memo? That parrot, er, point is dead. Deceased. Extinguished. Inoperative. Never happened. Retroactively denied. WTF!

> the Antarctic ice extent

"expected from climate modeling.... The prediction is old. In 1992 Manabe and coworkers, in running a changing CO2 experiment, noticed that the Antarctic sea ice cover increased with increasing CO2."

http://moregrumbinescience.blogspot.com/2010/03/wuwt-trumpets-result-supporting-climate.html

> indicative of the end of
> a cycle.

going to get worse faster now. Cycles superimposed over a trend.