Study in journal Nature: HALF of Arctic ice loss driven by natural swings — not ‘global warming’

  • Decline in ice cover due to ‘random’ and ‘chaotic’ natural changes in air currents
  • The rest has been driven by man-made global warming, scientists said

The Arctic icecap is shrinking – but it’s not all our fault, a major study of the polar region has found.

At least half of the disappearance is down to natural processes, and not the fault of man made warming.

Part of the decline in ice cover is due to ‘random’ and ‘chaotic’ natural changes in air currents, researchers said.

Part of the decline in ice cover is due to ‘random’ and ‘chaotic’ natural changes in air currents, researchers said. The rest has been driven by man-made global warming, scientists said.

Part of the decline in ice cover is due to ‘random’ and ‘chaotic’ natural changes in air currents, researchers said. The rest has been driven by man-made global warming, scientists said.

WHAT IT MEANS

The findings could help narrow down huge uncertainties about when the ice will vanish.

In 2013, a U.N. panel of climate scientists merely said human influences had ‘very likely contributed’ to the loss of Arctic ice, without estimating how much. It said that the ice could disappear by mid-century if emissions keep rising.

The rest has been driven by man-made global warming, scientists said.

The research means that although it is widely feared that the Arctic could soon be free of ice, this could be delayed if nature swings back to a cooler cycle.

Loss of the sea ice is predicted to have numerous effects on the planet: these include reflecting less light into space, potentially making the earth warmer and more predictable.

It will also reducing the habitat of animals such as polar bears.

Natural variations in the Arctic climate ‘may be responsible for about 30–50 percent of the overall decline in September sea ice since 1979,’ the U.S.-based team of scientists wrote in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Sea ice hit a record low in September 2012 – late summer in the Arctic – in satellite records dating back to 1979, and declines by around 13 per cent each year.

The ice is now around the smallest for mid-March, rivalling winter lows set in 2016 and 2015.

The study, separating man-made from natural influences in the Arctic atmospheric circulation, said that a decades-long natural warming of the Arctic climate might be tied to shifts as far away as the tropical Pacific Ocean.

Lead author Qinghua

Extent Of Multi-Year Arctic Sea Ice Is The Highest In A Decade

NOAA claims that multi-year Arctic sea ice (MYI) is “vanishing.” The Arctic’s oldest ice is vanishing | NOAA Climate.gov In fact, the area covered by MYI has doubled over the past decade, and is now at a ten year high. MYI is shown in white in the OSISAF ice type image below. ‎osisaf.met.no/p/osisaf_hlprod_qlook.php The extent of MYI has been rapidly increasing since 2008, and has more than doubled.

Source: Extent Of Multi-Year Arctic Sea Ice Is The Highest In A Decade

Science behind the video Polar Bear Scare Unmasked – updated paper now available

Announcing the publication today of Version 2 of my paper that tests the hypothesis that polar bear population declines result from rapid declines in summer sea ice, updated with recently available data. Version 2 provides the scientific support for the information presented in the GWPF video published yesterday, “ Polar Bear Scare Unmasked: The Sage of a Toppled Global Warming Icon ” (copied below). [The graphic above was created by me from the title page and two figures from the paper] Crockford, S.J. 2017 V2.

Source: Science behind the video Polar Bear Scare Unmasked – updated paper now available

Arctic ice extent ‘nearly identical’ to recent years — While Greenland is blowing away all records for ice gain

Alarmists’ Arctic Nightmare Continues

While climate alarmists have been telling endless lies about record heat and melting in the Arctic and Greenland this winter, thick ice has been pushing into the East Siberian, Chukchi and Beaufort Seas – which determine the summer minimum extent.

DMI Modelled ice thickness

Ice extent is nearly identical to all recent years.

Ocean and Ice Services | Danmarks Meteorologiske Institut

And Greenland is blowing away all records for ice gain.

Greenland Ice Sheet Surface Mass Budget: DMI

DELINGPOLE: Polar Bears Are a Pest – Time to End Their ‘Threatened’ Status

By James Delingpole:

The world’s exploding polar bear population which has now reached record highs of 30,000.
30,000 polar bears is a lot. As someone else remarked (remind me where and I’ll link to it), when Al Gore was born the population was just 5,000. Even as recently as 2005 it was estimated at no more than 22,500.

When the population of something explodes six-fold in 70 years that’s a sign that it’s doing pretty well, right? In fact, frankly, at that point it ceases to be a species in any kind of danger and starts to look more like a pest.

So why do the greenies persist in treating it like it’s a rare and precious species on the verge of extinction due to man’s selfishness and greed (TM)?

This is the question asked and answered by the best short video you will ever see about the polar bear non-problem.

It has been made by Canadian polar bear expert Susan Crockford for the Global Warming Policy Foundation and it calls for the US Administration to reassess the polar bear’s (utterly bogus) classification as a “threatened” species.

As the film makes clear, the polar bear is not “threatened” and hasn’t been for many decades (not since hunting was mostly banned). When in May 2008 the US Fish and Wildlife Service listed it as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act this was a political gesture not a scientific one.

The flimsy justification for the polar bear’s “threatened” status was the dramatic decline in summer sea ice which – so the fashionable theory ran – would render polar bears unable to feed because whenever they pursued seals they’d collapse through the thin ice.

This is a plausible theory so long as you know nothing about the feeding habits, behaviour and seasonal cycle of polar bears.

Polar bears, it turns out, do most of their feeding in early spring when they consume 8 months’ worth of their total food needs.

Mostly, they eat ring seals which are abundant in spring but have largely disappeared from the bears’ hunting grounds by summer, leaving only the lest tasty and harder-to-catch adult bearded and harp seals.

To be clear, polar bears are not “threatened”, “vulnerable” or otherwise “endangered” – and have not been at any time during the long period in which they have been exploited by snake-oil-selling greenies as the poster child for man-made …

New Paper Indicates More Arctic Sea Ice Now Than For Nearly All Of Last 10,000 Years

In a new paper (Stein et al., 2017), scientists find that Arctic sea ice retreat and advance is modulated by variations in solar activity.

In addition, the sea ice cover during the last century has only slightly retreated from the extent reached during coldest centuries of the Little Ice Age (1600s to 1800s AD), which had the highest sea ice cover of the last 10,000 years and flirted with excursions into year-round sea ice.

The Medieval Warm Period sea ice record (~900 to 1200 AD) had the lowest coverage since the Roman era ~2,000 years ago.

Of note, the paper makes no reference to carbon dioxide or anthropogenic forcing as factors modulating Arctic sea ice.



Stein et al., 2017

The causes that are controlling the decrease in sea ice are still under discussion. In several studies changes in extent, thickness and drift of Arctic sea ice are related to changes in the overall atmospheric circulation patterns as reflected in the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and Arctic Oscillation (AO). The NAO and AO are influencing changes of the relative position and strength of the two major surface-current systems of the Arctic Ocean.

The increase in sea ice extent during the late Holocene seems to be a circum-Arctic phenomenon, coinciding with major glacier advances on Franz Josef Land, Spitsbergen and Scandinavia.  The increase in sea ice may have resulted from the continuing cooling trend due to decreased solar insolation and reduced heat flow from the Pacific.

The increase in sea ice extent during the late Holocene seems to be a circum-Arctic phenomenon as PIP25-based sea ice records from the Fram Strait, Laptev Sea, East Siberian Sea and Chukchi Sea  display a generally quite similar evolution, all coinciding with the decrease in solar radiation.

The main factors controlling the millennial variability in sea ice and surface-water productivity are probably changes in surface water and heat flow from the Pacific into the Arctic Ocean as well as the long-term decrease in summer insolation, whereas short-term centennial variability observed in the high-resolution middle Holocene record was possibly triggered by solar forcing.


Robust substantiation for the trends documented in this new Arctic sea ice record comes from a 2005 paper by Lassen and Thejll entitled “Multi-decadal variation of the East Greenland Sea- Ice Extent: AD 1500-2000.”   Shown below is an annotated graph from the paper

Antarctic Record Temperature Con – ‘Balmy temperatures’ claim is ‘clearly nonsense’

Via: https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2017/03/02/antarctic-record-temperature-con/

By Paul Homewood

The supposed record comes from Esperanza. As Jim Steele at WUWT points out, Esperanza is at the northern tip of the Antarctic peninsula, at a latitude of 63.4S, just about as far outside the Antarctic Circle as you could get.

 

https://i1.wp.com/voices.lafayette.edu/files/2015/04/esperanza-base-300x300.jpg

 

 

And as WUWT also points out,  the temperature was purely the product of a fohn wind.

The temperature of 63.5F was actually set in March 2015, but has only just been officially confirmed by the WMO. As the Capital Weather Gang at the Washington Post noted at the time, the previous record of 62.8F was also set at Esperanza as far back as 1961.

The implication now is that “balmy” temperatures of 63F are unheard of Antarctica, which is clearly nonsense.

And as we can see, monthly average temperatures in March 2015 were not in the least unusual. Indeed, the hottest March was in 1965.

 

image

https://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/show_station.cgi?id=301889630008&dt=1&ds=14

 

None of this information is mentioned by either Greenpeace, or media outlets such as MSN, who also carry the story.

 

 

But the really dishonest part is that photo of two poor penguins stranded at the top of a melting lump of snow.

As Joe has discovered, exactly the same photo appeared in December 2013, in an article by the International Science Times, which was about record cold temperatures in Antarctica. The picture is actually on Cape Denison, as the report makes clear:

 

image

When it’s late February and you’re complaining about the winter dragging endlessly on, take comfort in the fact that you’re not on the East Antarctic Plateau, where scientists have measured the coldest temperature on earth. At negative 135.8 degrees Fahrenheit, the August 10, 2010, temperature was “tens of degrees colder than anything ever seen in Alaska, Siberia or Greenland,” said Ted Scambos of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., the group that made the discovery.

http://www.isciencetimes.com/articles/6506/20131210/scientists-locate-coldest-place-earth-east-antarctic-plateau.htm

Antarctica Set Record High Temperature In 2015 After Setting Record Cold Record in 2014

Sounds like a nice balmy day on the Antarctic Peninsula, but let’s put the news into context.

The Esperanza base is located on the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula and just outside the Antarctic Circle. The base is farther north than the Vanda Station, which at the mouth of the Onyx River.

Temperatures around the base average 22 degrees Fahrenheit, but fluctuate widely throughout the year. March is near the end of the Antarctic summer when temperatures typically peak, so a record-high reading is most likely to occur during this time.

Antarctica logged a record-cold temperature in 2014, according to NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt, but until confirmed by the WMO, the coldest temperature ever recorded in the South Pole was -128.6 degrees Fahrenheit at the Soviet Union’s Vostok Station on July 21, 1983.

The Weather Underground first reported the record-breaking temperature in 2015, but it was confirmed by the WMO until Wednesday.

Weather Underground noted the record temperature readings “were made possible by an unusually extreme jet stream contortion that brought a strong ridge of high pressure over the Antarctic Peninsula, allowing warm air from South America to push southwards over Antarctica.”

Antarctic sea ice was at record levels in 2014 — records that were shattered in 2015. Sea ice has since hit record-lows in 2016 as global average temperature got a boost from an incredibly strong El Nino warming event.…