This summer may see first ice-free North Pole

Praxius

Mass'Debater
Dec 18, 2007
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Getting really really thin, sort of like the ice the deniers are standing on.:lol:

O'Rly?

I remember last winter being pretty damn cold and a crap load of snow falling early in the winter.... much more then the previous years..... and guess who just recently got a pile of snow?



Power restored to thousands of Ont., Que. residents
CTV.ca | Power restored to thousands of Ont., Que. residents

Power has been restored to thousands of residents who were stuck in the dark Wednesday after a fierce storm blew through eastern Ontario and western Quebec the previous night.


The storm left behind as much as 15 centimetres of snow and thousands of homes and businesses were without power.

Oh, and the ice didn't completely vanish this summer, so who's the one who's on thin ice?

Funny how everytime the Global Warmongers predict something, they always get it wrong, and then ignore their previous predictions that were wrong and go for a bunch of other dumbass predictions..... which never come true either.

"Oh, the ice in the north didn't vanish this summer.... but it's getting thin."

Whatever.
 
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earth_as_one

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Jan 5, 2006
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MYTH: Recent cold winters and cool summers don’t feel like global warming to me.
FACT: While different pockets of the country have experienced some cold winters here and there, the overall trend is warmer winters.
Measurements show that over the last century the Earth’s climate has warmed overall, in all seasons, and in most regions. Climate skeptics mislead the public when they claim that the winter of 2003–2004 was the coldest ever in the northeastern United States. That winter was only the 33rd coldest in the region since records began in 1896. Furthermore, a single year of cold weather in one region of the globe is not an indication of a trend in the global climate, which refers to a long-term average over the entire planet.

Global Warming Myths and Facts - Global Warming - Environmental Defense Fund
 

Ron in Regina

"Voice of the West" Party
Apr 9, 2008
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The winter here in Regina,SK was the fourth coldest since they started keeping records. My starter
finally piled up on my little car on the fourth day of consecutive -50+C weather with the wind chill.
Couldn't get my car into a shop for a couple of more days (every shop was too busy) so I walked
back and forth to work. That snap lasted over a week. Dexter Sinister is in the same town as me.
He can verify this.

This summer (here anyway) was much cooler than the last several. Didn't need the air conditioner
at all this year. Does this say anything one way or the other about global warming? Nope.

I remember almost all summers from the '70's into the '90's that where much warmer than this
one that just passed. Does this say anything one way or the other about global warming? Nope.

I don't remember a winter colder than this last one (here, anyway). Does this say anything one
way or the other about global warming? Nope. The early '70's had much more snow (here)
than the last 35 years or so. Does this say anything one way or the other about global warming?
I don't know.

The City of Regina could be one of those isolated pockets that defy the logic of Global Warming
though. I've heard that Saskatchewan is always 30yrs behind the rest of Canada. We can have
booze or strippers, but not both in the same place. We haven't gotten back on the daylight
savings thing for decades. Maybe in a few decades when the rest of the world is baking
in the sun, and the coastal cities are under several feet of water, Saskatchewan will catch
up and notice the effects that don't seem to be here yet. I think we might have been one
of the last places in Canada (if not the last) to be able to buy beer in cans.
 

Avro

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Feb 12, 2007
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I wonder Walt, did you even look at this chart?

I don't think you did, you went about your buisness and then stuck your fat head back in the sand.....at least Harper knows the threat.
 

Walter

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Stretch

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The Antarctic Wilkins Ice Shelf Collapse: Media Recycles Photos and Storylines from Previous Years

'Those masters of disaster are at it again, and it appears our friendly scientists at that National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) help this story along each year. Thanks to WUWT reader Ron de Haan who spotted this. Note the dates for these two stories are a year apart, but use the same photo.
It seems that not only is the photography recycled, so is the storyline. It seems to happen every year, about this time. Note the photos show shear failure and cracks, not melted ice. Shear failure is mostly mechanical-stress related, though ice does tend to be more brittle at colder temperatures.'
The Antarctic Wilkins Ice Shelf Collapse: Media recycles photos and storylines from previous years « Watts Up With That?
 

JLM

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Nov 27, 2008
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This summer may see first ice-free North Pole


SETH BORENSTEIN
The Associated Press


WASHINGTON A leading ice scientist says there's a 50-50 chance that the North Pole will be ice-free this summer, which would be a first in recorded history.
He says the weather and ocean conditions in the next couple of weeks will determine how much of the sea ice will melt, and early signs are not good.
Mark Serreze is a senior researcher at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colo. He says the chances for a total meltdown at the pole are higher than ever because the layer of ice coating the sea is thinner than ever.
Mr. Serreze says there is nothing scientifically significant about the North Pole, but there is a cultural and symbolic importance.
Last August, the Northwest Passage was open to navigation for the first time in memory.
Preliminary February and March data from a NASA satellite shows that the circle of ice surrounding the North Pole is considerably thinner than scientists have seen during the five years the satellite has been taking pictures, NASA ice scientist Jay Zwally said Friday. He thinks there is slightly less than a 50-50 chance the North Pole will be ice-free.
Last year was a record year for ice melt all over the Arctic and the ice band surrounding the North Pole is even thinner now.
A large area at the North Pole and surrounding the North Pole is first-year ice, Mr. Serreze said. That's the stuff that tends to melt out in the summer because it's thin.
A more conservative ice scientist, Cecilia Bitz at the University of Washington, put the odds of a North Pole without ice closer to 1-in-4. Even that is far worse than climate models had predicted, which was 1-in-70 some time in the next decade, she said.
But both she and Mr. Serreze agree it's just a matter of time.
I would guess within the next 10 years it would happen at least once, Ms. Bitz said.
Already, figures from the National Snow and Ice Data Center show sea ice in the Arctic as a whole at about the same level now as it was at its low point last year in late June and early July.
The explanation is a warming climate and a weather phenomenon, scientists said.
For the last couple of decades, there has been a steady melt of Arctic sea ice, which covers only the ocean and which thins during summer and refreezes in winter. In recent years, it has gradually become thinner because more of it has been melting as the Earth's temperature rises.
Then, this past winter, there was a natural weather shift called the Arctic Oscillation, sort of a cold weather cousin to El Nino. That oscillation caused a change in winds and ocean that accelerated a normal flushing of sea ice in the Arctic. That pushed the older thicker sea ice that had been over the North Pole south toward Greenland and eventually out of the Arctic, Mr. Serreze said. That left just a thin one-year layer of ice that previously covered part of Siberia.

Probably another case of where "The news" is trying to make the news. Let's just wait and see.
 

JLM

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A 50 50 chance eh? That's some clear cut science at work there...:roll:

Of course it's going to be 50/50, either it will be or it won't be, how much closer can you get to 50/50 than that? And if it's up there who's going to know about it anyway? It's just a cleansing process anyway, can you imagine how much sludge and scum has been collecting on all that ice over thousands of years, time for it to melt off and settle back down to the bottom of the ocean and then next year we can look forward to some nice fresh ice.
 

earth_as_one

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I lived in Canada's arctic for 5 years. The further north you go, the colder it gets and as a result there's less snow. Sounds contradictory, but not when you consider that it doesn't snow very much at -40C. Most of the Arctic has so little precipitation that it can be classified as desert. The area is moist because snow and ice doesn't evaporate or run off like water. When spring comes in June, the area dries up like anywhere else, but by September everything is frozen again.

I'm not surprised that some areas of Antarctica get more snow as the earth warms up. It makes sense. Increased temperatures (say from -30C to -10C) would mean more precipitation in the form of snow. But its still cold enough that the snow doesn't melt. As a result, the glaciers get thicker, not thinner. This is good news for people living along oceans. But its also possible that increased temperatures could lead to increased melt water which would lubricate Antarctic glaciers and increase their speed, which would be bad news for people living along oceans even if the glaciers are getting thicker.

The glaciers in southern Greenland are melting and moving. In fact, Kangerdlugssuaq Glacier went from standing still in 1996 to flowing at a rate of 14 kilometers a year by 2005, making it one of the fastest moving glaciers in the world. According to a new study, all of Greenland's coastal glaciers are already experiencing or may soon experience such speedups, meaning that Greenland's ice will contribute even more than expected to the world's rising seas.

Greenland's Glaciers: Melting and On The Move: Scientific American

All this proves is that the consequences of global warming aren't so easily predicted.

Getting back to the subject. The Arctic sea ice probably has more in common with Antarctic ice shelves than Antarctic glaciers. If this is true, that implies that the sea ice will thin and weaken (already observed). When the sea ice disappears, it may be sudden and dramatic like the Wilkins Ice Shelf.

The decline of the Arctic sea ice is a long term trend. Individual years may prove an exception to the trend. This year is shaping up to be an exception. Unless things change, this year will probably have more ice cover than last year. Which means little over the long term.
 

Walter

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The decline of the Arctic sea ice is a long term trend. Individual years may prove an exception to the trend. This year is shaping up to be an exception. Unless things change, this year will probably have more ice cover than last year. Which means little over the long term.
 

earth_as_one

Time Out
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Sure, but go back to the 70's and previous and its obvious the long term trend is less ice in Canada's arctic, not stability.
 

coldstream

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Oct 19, 2005
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Does anyone remember this, it was posted here some time ago. I don't think any of the warming is happening. Our cold winters of the last 3 years is not an anomaly in a warming trend, it is symptomatic of a cooling trend that will last atleast another decade, likely longer.

You can infer from that, in a time when the fractional amount of carbon that man puts into the atmosphere increasing, but is still miniscule compared to geological, biological, oceanic inputs is having NO effect on the world's climate.

We just have a desperate GW idustry now searching the World for whatever proof it can for a warming trend, and failing that adjusting their models to pedict a plateau of effects, before warming will return with avengance.

This is a political construct, one being promoted by people whose reputations and livelihoods, in some cases their fortunes, are completely invested in what is turning out to be, junk science.

Lorne Gunter, National Post Published: Monday, March 02, 2009

The Earth has been cooling for a decade. While it may be true (or not, depending on whose figures one uses) that 1998 was the second-warmest year on record, and that seven or eight of the years since were in the top 10, no year since has been warmer than 1998 and nearly every one has been cooler than the one before it.

The trend is decidedly downward. Indeed, the drop in temperatures since late-2007 has been so precipitous --nearly a full degree Celsius-- that almost all of the global warming that has occurred since the late-1970s has disappeared.

One of the criticisms of global warming predictions is that models cannot even reproduce climate for which we already have detailed records. So last spring, when climate scientists at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Science and the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology managed -- finally -- to use their supercomputer to recreate the climate of the past half-century, there was much anticipation of what their predictions would be for the next half. What they said was that global temperatures would continue to fall for at least another decade, perhaps longer.

When I wrote last year that this 20-year intermission in upward temperature trends bruised the credibility of global warming scientists and alarmist environmentalists, several of them wrote me to say they had never predicted steadily rising temperatures. No, no, they insisted, all along they had expected periods -- even some long ones -- in which temperatures would retreat before surging ahead again. So the currently cooling fit right in with what they had been predicting all along.

This, of course, was revisionist hogwash -- if only because the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claimed there was no doubt that disastrous manmade warming was already upon us. The IPCC further predicted temperatures this decade would rise 0.3C and by similar amounts every decade through 2100.

I had been fully prepared for the alarmists to take credit for the cooling once it became undeniable. What I had not predicted was the hubris and intellectual dishonesty that permitted the warmers to insist they knew all along of facts contrary to their theories, but believed those facts reinforced, rather than undermined, the validity of their earlier claims.

Now, a similarly Orwellian doublethink is happening over Arctic sea ice. Since last fall, Arctic ice has been expanding faster than at any time since satellite records became available in 1979. The ice cap is now only a fraction smaller than in 1980 -- when it was at its largest.

Not only has this news not received much reporting, but the fact that ice sensors in the North have been malfunctioning, which has very likely led to a further underestimating of the amount of ice around the pole, has set off another we-never-claimed-it-was-an-emergency moment among greenies.

Taking exception to a column written by The Washington Post's George Will, New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin -- one of the warmers' most reliable trumpets -- wrote recently, "I've not met a single scientist focussed on sea ice who would point to a single year's changes as evidence" of global warming.
Pardon me!?

Since hurricanes stopped menacing the U. S. coastline, the supposedly rapidly melting polar ice has been the biggest alarmist story.

Consider these two examples from the scores of articles and scientists claiming the proof of dangerous warming is visible in each melting ice flow:

-Mark Serreze, one of the most prominent Arctic ice scientists in the world and a researcher at the U. S. National Snow and Ice Center, said last summer's melt proved "Arctic ice is in its death spiral," and would be completely gone each summer by 2030.
-Last fall, a group of international scientists, led by Environment Canada climatologist Nathan Gillett, insisted in the journal Nature Geoscience that, among other factors, Arctic melting was proof manmade warming was harming the planet.
Winston Smith, of course, was the character in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty- Four whose job it was to rewrite history, literally, and send the old, embarrassing versions that had been overtaken by facts down the memory hole for destruction. As the consensus on warming crumbles, expect more such Winston Smith denials from the theory's true believers.
 
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