Time to look at the Arctic sea ice 2016

There has been some unusual weather in the Arctic again and it's even captured the attention of deniers. Arctic ice watcher, Neven, has been keeping a close eye on arctic cyclones and their impact, aided by other people who have built up some knowledge in the subject. They are wondering if these sort of events will happen more often than they used to. Earlier this year, in early spring, Arctic sea ice was at record low levels for that time of the year. It's not kept this place however it is still very low, being currently the third lowest on record for the time of year, just above 2007.

Anthony Watts is a blogging climate conspiracy theorist who tries to downplay climate change. He has built up a reputation in the dim corners of the internet for promoting "climate hoax" conspiracy theories and "ice age cometh" articles. Yes, even this year, during the hottest decade on record, and what will probably be the third in a row hottest year on record, and after ten "hottest months" on record, and the hottest ever month on record. As the world heats up relentlessly, deniers are looking crazier and crazier.

Recycling Arctic cyclones at WUWT

In my last article I commented how Anthony Watts seemed to have forgotten that he'd already published three articles on Trenberth and Fasullo in the last month, when he put up his fourth article about the paper.

Today he's reposted/recycled another article from last month.  This time about cyclones in the Arctic.   Here are the web archives - December 2013 and January 2014.

Maybe Anthony needs a check up.  I mean forgetting once can be put down to normal human forgetfulness.  Forgetting twice can be put down to not reading the articles he posts.  But forgetting twice in two consecutive days?

More (smaller, short-lived) cyclones than previously thought

Anyway, (if I recall correctly - ha ha) I didn't write about it back in December so here's a summary, based on this article at ScienceDaily.com.  The article was about findings presented at AGU13:

From 2000 to 2010, about 1,900 cyclones churned across the top of the world each year, leaving warm water and air in their wakes -- and melting sea ice in the Arctic Ocean.

That's about 40 percent more than previously thought, according to a new analysis of these Arctic storms.

A 40 percent difference in the number of cyclones could be important to anyone who lives north of 55 degrees latitude -- the area of the study, which includes the northern reaches of Canada, Scandinavia and Russia, along with the state of Alaska.

The finding is also important to researchers who want to get a clear picture of current weather patterns, and a better understanding of potential climate change in the future, explained David Bromwich, professor of geography at The Ohio State University and senior research scientist at the Byrd Polar Research Center.

Anthony previously wrote about the 2012 Arctic cyclone - 27 August 2012 and 19 September 2012 and 24 September 2012 and 27 December 2012 and maybe elsewhere.  In those articles he was implying that the record low summer arctic ice in 2012 could be all blamed on the cyclone.  (In other articles Anthony's posted photos of various ships, misrepresenting where they were and when, in an futile effort to claim that the sharp decline in Arctic sea ice isn't "unusual".)

In these latest articles, Anthony seems to be implying something but I'm not sure what - maybe that Arctic cyclones are causing all the Arctic ice to melt? He wrote:

News media back then seemed to think this was a new thing, and downplayed the role of the cyclone is breaking up sea ice, preferring to attribute it to the omnipotent global warming. Apparently it’s just business as usual for the Arctic.

Still, it's a more rational hypothesis than blaming the Arctic summer ice decline on icebreakers!

Summer is the time for cyclones

Now the thing is that the whole reason that the cyclones weren't easily detected was because they were so small and short-lived, unlike the mammoth cyclone in 2012.  Naturally Neven is right on top of this topic at his Arctic Sea Ice blog.  Neven wrote a number of articles on the big 2012 storm, such as this one.  And in regard to Arctic summer storms in general, here is a quote from an article he referenced last August, here:

“People seem to have this thought that all this storminess is unusual,” said Mark Serreze, an Arctic climatologist and center director at NSIDC. “Well it’s not. It simply isn’t. Summer is the time for cyclones.” Arctic summers are not calm. In fact, the months of August and September see a maximum amount of cyclonic activity. Not every summer is very stormy, but overall, the Arctic is the Arctic for a reason.

So if Anthony Watts and his band of science deniers think that the Arctic is melting purely because of cyclones, that would be wrong.

Anyway, that's enough of that.  Arctic sea ice is Neven's specialty.  His blog is a mine of information and habituated by people who understand and are interested in science.  (Avoid anti-science blogs like WUWT unless you want your brain filled chock-a-block with nonsense.)

Old and new warming in the Eurasian Arctic and denier weirdness at WUWT

Anthony Watts seems to have put his foot in it again, but has pulled it out just a little (archived here - updated here).

Today he posted an article about a new paper with some analysis of an ice core from the Eurasian Arctic, in the vicinity of the Kara and Barents Seas. Going by his note at the bottom, perhaps Anthony originally tried to use the paper to "prove" something about Cowtan and Way - maybe that it was wrong.  His note reads:

[Note: this original post was written during my workday and making a comparison to the Cowtan and Way paper, and like sometimes happens during my day, I got interrupted, and then got off on a tangent that wasn't correct. To correct my mistake, I've republished this post sans that tangent. Later I'll get back to my original idea when I have more time.  - Anthony]

My guess is that we'll be waiting for about the same length of time for him to write about his "original idea" as we'll be waiting for his promised publication about "Watts et al 2012 draft paper", which has been slipping so far down the sidebar at WUWT that it's looking as if it's about to drop right off.

Resurrecting an old favourite

In honour of this new paper, Anthony resurrected an old favourite of the denialati:

The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft, at Bergen, Norway.

Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm.
Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.

The above is from a newspaper article that's been circulating among the denialati for years.  You can read the full article here.  The article describes how the west coast of Spitzbergen right up to the north was significantly warmer than normal back in the early 1920s.

It may well have been the same factors operating in both locations in the early part of last century.  The Opel paper doesn't specifically mention Spitzbergen but it does discuss Arctic-wide changes.

Here is a map of the eastern portion of the Arctic region, showing the locations of the Akademii Nauk (AN) ice core and Spitzbergen (click for larger view):

Adapted from Google Earth

AN ice core may tell 3,000 years of climate history

Back to the paper itself, which is open access.  The paper is by Thomas Opel, D. Fritzsche, and H. Meyer and published in the journal Climate of the Past.  In it, they provide more climatic information about the region as derived from an ice core.  The conclusion of the paper is that the Akademii Nauk (AN) ice core has the potential to provide a 3,000 year or so high resolution record of the climate of the western Eurasian Arctic:

The results presented in this paper highlight the potential of the AN ice core as a high-resolution climate archive for the Late Holocene, i.e. about the last three millennia. Beside a long-term decrease due to climate cooling and ice-cap growth the AN 18O record shows evidence of major temperature changes over the last millennium that are representative at least of the western Eurasian Arctic, i.e. the Barents and Kara seas region. Of particular importance are several abrupt cooling and warming events leading e.g. to the absolute SAT minimum around 1800 and the absolute SAT maximum in the early 20th century, accompanied by significant changes in sodium concentrations. The ETCW exhibits a specific double-peaked shape typical of the Barents and Kara seas region. Abrupt changes in the last centuries might be caused by internal climate dynamics related to shifts of atmospheric circulation patterns and corresponding sea-ice feedbacks.

Anthony Watts confuses local with global

I think Anthony Watts was hoping for more, maybe even proof that global warming isn't happening.   Or maybe he was hoping it showed that the Arctic summer sea ice isn't really on a death spiral.  Or maybe that "it's natural" and "it's the sun" or "climate always changes".  In his article Anthony writes (my bold italics):

Of course, just like the surface temperature record, the long term trend is up, but clearly there is also a pause since the double peak, and that’s hard to explain in the face of a linear increase of (some claim exponential) GHG emissions.

Climate shifts in the past may be "hard to explain" but not in the way Anthony suggests.  Anthony is confusing local climate with global climate.  You would think he would have learnt by now that at the regional and local level, surface temperatures don't necessarily follow global temperature trends.  But even after all his years announcing weather followed by several years blogging about it, Anthony Watts still doesn't seem to know the first thing about weather and climate.

As an aside, you'll have noticed that Anthony Watts, despite claiming to keep a climate blog, isn't even clear about the single biggest factor affecting climate today - greenhouse gas emissions.  They are indeed still rising exponentially.  It's not been a linear rise.  There are already signs that 2013 will create a new record in greenhouse gas emissions.

Climate shifts in the Arctic - a see-saw effect?

The paper provides some explanation for climate shifts in the Eurasian Arctic.  In the body of the paper the authors expand on the following relevant part of their conclusion:

Abrupt changes in the last centuries might be caused by internal climate dynamics related to shifts of atmospheric circulation patterns and corresponding sea-ice feedbacks

They discuss a possible see-saw effect operating across the Arctic at certain times, for example:

Whereas our AN 18O and the Arctic-wide SAT records (Kaufman et al., 2009; PAGES 2k Consortium, 2013) display similar patterns in the 11th and 12th centuries, they show clearly contrary trends in the 15th and 16th centuries (Fig. 6). Abrupt cooling events in the Barents and Kara seas region are accompanied by warming events on the Arctic scale and vice versa. The causes of these differences may be similar to those already discussed for the periods around 1800 and in the early 20th century. This pattern might be interpreted as a kind of SAT see-saw on a predominantly spatial scale (Eurasian vs. North American Arctic) but may contain also, to a lesser extent, seasonal effects (annual vs. summer).

The modern record at the AN ice core site

In the comments, the arguably most respected layperson who watches the Arctic, Neven, pointed out that the paper reports temperatures only up to 1998, after which temperatures are likely to have gone up even further.  NevenA says:

November 19, 2013 at 12:51 pm
That graph unfortunately ends in 1998, whereas we can safely assume that Arctic amplification and surface air temperature rate acceleration kicked in after that.

Well, Anthony didn't like that one bit.  After all, he's busy trying to prove that "all the science is wrong" by referring to the science (yeah, illogical what?).  Anthony responds in-line writing:

REPLY: simply because you say it does? Show/prove it “Gunther” – Anthony

Zeke Hausfather provided some links to temperature data for the region, at greater or lesser distances from the AN ice core.  Here is the closest record I could find at Berkeley Earth.  It is located at 79.553N 90.596E, compared to the AN core which was from 80.52 N, 94.82E.

Source: Berkeley Earth

The above station is the one referenced by Opel et al (2009), which was also the reference cited in Opel13, the paper discussed in this article.  Opel09 stated:

After a SAT maximum in the 1950s, Golomyanny data show a cooler period until 1980 and a warming trend since 1990, though without reaching the values of the 1950s.

The records for that station only go back to the 1930s, not the 1920s.  Berkeley Earth record is a bit different from Opel09, suggesting that until the last few years, the highest temperature was in the early 1940s.  I'll leave it to the experts to sort that one out.  The above record also suggests hotter than ever temperatures now, since the 2009 paper was written.

"Isolated pockets of humanity require warmth"

Anthony swings into his "UHI disease" mode and disputes temperature records he doesn't like - even when they are supported by such obvious signs of warming as the huge drop in summer sea ice in the Arctic.  I guess he still thinks that you don't need warmth to melt the ice.  Anthony makes silly comments like:
"What may be happening is that the stations that are left have a warm bias."

Zeke Hausfather points out that the recent warming in the Arctic is "not particularly controversial" and that "pretty much anywhere you look in the arctic, the land warming post-2000 is pretty remarkable".  To which Anthony sullenly and obstinately replies:

REPLY: Still, I’d like to know what individual station records are active and which ones are not – and when. One thing I’ve noted studying Arctic stations is that they all tend to be isolated pockets of humanity, which require warmth. Warmth that of course becomes local waste heat. Do you have a mechanism to show what records make up your regionalized temperature potpourri and when they were made inactive? – Anthony

Who could forget this classic case of Anthony Watts and human warmth and ice, this time in Antarctica :)

Comparing millennial records across the Arctic

In any case, the paper is more about having a high resolution millenial record of the climate for the region, not about whether the temperature this year at the site has yet reached that of the 1920s maxima - for which there is not a single unbroken source of annual or seasonal data.  (Although it does look as if it's been as hot recently if not hotter.)

Here is the chart from the paper comparing the data from the AN ice core with that of other analyses going from 1998 and back as far as 1100 years in some cases.  The AN data is in light gray for each section.  Click for larger view:

Fig. 6. AN 18O record (including linear trends for 900–1760 and 1800–1998) compared to (from top to bottom) Austfonna and Lomonosovfonna-18O (Isaksson et al., 2005), Vetreniy ice-cap 18O (Henderson, 2002; data from Kinnard et al., 2011), Arctic summer SAT anomalies (Kaufman et al., 2009), Arctic annual SAT anomalies (PAGES 2k Consortium et al., 2013), AN sodium concentrations, and Arctic sea-ice extent (Kinnard et al., 2011) records. Displayed are 5 yrm values for AN 18O (thin line), 15 yrm values for AN 18O, Austfonna and Lomonosovfonna 18O, Vetreniy ice-cap 18O, Arctic annual SAT anomalies, AN sodium concentrations and Arctic sea ice (thick lines) as well as 10 yr means for Arctic summer SAT (thick line). For easier comparison, to each graph the AN 18O 15 yrm record is added in light grey in the same scale as above and adjusted for the best fit of the 20th century maximum (except for Arctic sea ice). Abrupt warming and cooling events exceeding the dominant variability of the AN 18O record are marked by a red asterisk. Note the different scale for the Lomonosovfonna 18O record.

No medieval climate anomaly at Akademii Nauk

I expect Anthony Watts is in a bit of a bind.  He wants to use Opel13 to "prove" something about global warming.  He's not sure what he wants to prove.  He seems to have settled on the fact that there was a warm period early last century.  But then if he accepts the paper, he may be forced to gloss over the fact that there was no evidence of a medieval climate anomaly or the little ice age at that particular location.

Neither a pronounced Medieval Climate Anomaly nor a Little Ice Age are detectable in the AN 18O record. In contrast, there is evidence of several abrupt warming and cooling events, such as in the 15th and 16th centuries, partly accompanied by corresponding changes in sodium concentrations. These abrupt changes are assumed to be related to sea-ice cover variability in the Barents and Kara seas region, which might be caused by shifts in atmospheric circulation patterns. Our results indicate a significant impact of internal climate variability on Arctic climate change in the last millennium.

People who follow climate science rather than climate disinformation won't have any problem with the above.  They know that there were some regions of the world where temperatures got quite warm during medieval times (eg Greenland) and many parts of the world where it got cold in the little ice age.  They know that different parts of the world can get cold while other parts get warm and vice versa.  (Anthony Watts and his crowd find all that a bit too complicated.)

From the WUWT comments

Here are some examples of denier weirdness from the comments (archived here).

philjourdan doesn't have a clue what was reported in the paper itself but he gaily says "it's devastating":

November 19, 2013 at 12:52 pm
This paper is devastating to the whole AGW issue. Instead of seeing a rise, we now have a 60+ year pause, at least in the Arctic which is supposed to be the canary in the AGW coal mine. The pause is easily twice as long as any increase that caused the kerfuffle in the first place. In simple terms, there is no there there. We have a planet ignoring the carbon based units that inhabit it.

Espen doesn't seem to realise that Arctic warmth in the early 20th century is not news to climate scientists and says:

November 19, 2013 at 1:35 pm
Zeke Hausfather, yeah, right, so probably the current warm period in the arctic is a little warmer than the one in the early 20th century. But that pesky early 20th century Arctic warming is nevertheless a huge problem for those that desperately want the Arctic to be the canary in the AGW mine. Like, for instance, Tamino, who got so p***ed that he black listed me permanently when I used that warm period to question his toying around with Bayes theorem here.

Crispin in Waterloo but really in Ulaanbaatar makes a very odd comment about the medieval climate anomaly being a "colder deviation" and says:

November 19, 2013 at 2:25 pm
...The Medieval climate anomaly was a strongly colder deviation from the 8000 year long term cooling trend so it is probably correct to call it anomalous. We are very lucky it didn’t stay down.

Rhoda R has made up her mind about past warming, its duration and probably its location. She doesn't give tuppence for science or data and says:

November 19, 2013 at 2:40 pm
Using the term “Medieval Climate Anomaly” is an attempt by the warmist crowd to belittle the impact of sever hundred years when the climate was warmer than it is today. Using the term “anomaly” implies a brief, transient event — something not really worth mentioning.

Truthseeker ignorantly says "who cares":

November 19, 2013 at 4:24 pm
Really why do we care what the artic does? It is mostly sea ice which will have little effect on sea levels regardless of the state it is in. With less ice, navigation will become easier and less risky. It really is not important enough to waste any time or resources on.

And finally, a gem from our old mate jim Steele who says (excerpt):

November 19, 2013 at 4:58 pm Not much observational data to support warming since the 50s!

Really, Jim?

Source: Polar Science Center, University of Washington

And if you don't like "models" how about this?

---

Opel, Thomas, et al. "Eurasian Arctic climate over the past millennium as recorded in the
Akademii Nauk ice core (Severnaya Zemlya)." Clim. Past, 9, 2379–2389, 2013 doi:10.5194/cp-9-2379-2013

Opel, Thomas, et al. "115 year ice-core data from Akademii Nauk ice cap, Severnaya Zemlya: high-resolution record of Eurasian Arctic climate change." Journal of Glaciology 55.189 (2009): 21-31.

Holey Moley Arctic

Anthony Watts has another post up at WUWT protesting the declining ice in the Arctic by pretending that it's not unusual.  At least this time he left off the photo that was proven to be not of a submarine at the north pole in 1959.  He's jumped ahead nearly 30 years to 1987.

Holey Moley - From Neven:

Watts seems to have a renewed interest in the Arctic, now that we won't be seeing back-to-back records after last year's insane record smashing melting season. I prefer to ignore his sh*t, but his timing was so impeccable this time that I had to react: Hole.

If you've not been keeping up with Neven's excellent Arctic Sea Ice blog (eg on the grounds that this year may not be another record low), you're missing out.  As John Abraham wrote in the Guardian recently (my bold italics):

Neven, like many other armchair scientists has little formal training. But, he makes up for that with a doggedness that would impress anyone. While he describes his blog as basically weather reports, many publishing researchers turn to him for a comprehensive view of current conditions. Do you want to know what the short term ice conditions will likely be? Ask Neven. Interested in learning about impacts of current conditions on the atmosphere? Ask Neven.

Not only is he a great resource, but the commenters provide insightful thoughts as well. And very often, they are not in agreement with each other. It is refreshing to see people engage in polite yet candid discussions of various views of our Arctic.

Neven is fact-full and normally doesn't say much about disinformation from deniers, preferring to explore what is happening to Arctic sea ice.  But he is not unaware of Anthony Watts and others like him who are in the climate science denial business.

Go read his latest article.  While Anthony Watts is posting unconvincing BS with his "the holes now are no different", it looks as if there are real holes in the ice opening up near the north pole.  The holes will be considerably bigger (kilometers wide) than the little cracks shown in Anthony's August 1987 photo, which look as if they aren't much more than about 100 m or so in diameter from the photo. (The length of the longest sub in the picture, USS Billfish is 95.02 metres).

Here is Anthony's "evidence":

Credit: Commander Submarine Force, U.S. Pacific Fleet

The above photo, taken in 1987, is described as:

USS BILLFISH (SSN 676), CDR F. Terry Jones (Jeffrey Gossett), USS SEA DEVIL (SSN 664), CDR Dennis A. Napior (Douglas Shaefer), and HMS SUPERB (S 109), CDR James Collins (Don Stephens), conducted the first multi-national 3-ship rendezvous at the North Pole

North Pole not so trivial trivia

Incidentally, 1987 was the year that Australian Dick Smith became the first person to fly a helicopter over the North Pole!

And some more interesting bits of non-trivial trivia that I came across while researching this.  Who was the first person to reach the North Pole and when?  More on that here.  And how easy was it to get to the North Pole back in 1988?  What about trying on a sailboard?  Does anyone know if Stéphane Peyron made it? He did cross the Atlantic on a wind-surfer. Back in 1988 (glasnost era) a joint Canadian-Russian group tried crossing the Arctic on skiis to promote international cooperation, and they made it!

This article gives a thumbnail sketch of the Arctic with some historical context.

From 1958 to to 1987 to 2010

As for Anthony's wrong then corrected then repeated but uncorrected claim relating to a photo he wrongly attributes to a submarine surfacing at the North Pole in 1959.  While the Skate did surface at the North Pole in March 1959, Anthony's photo was not of that event.  Nor does it signal that ice cover today is anything like what it was back then.

Here is a comparison of Arctic seasonal sea ice extent over the years from 1900 to 2010. Click the image for a larger version.

Source: Cryosphere Today

1958 - First sub go under the North Pole (reportedly)

And here's an article about the first ever submarine to travel under the North Pole - or perhaps to admit to it.  The Nautilus.  In August 1958. But it didn't surface there.  Here is a paragraph:

The submarine traveled at a depth of about 500 feet, and the ice cap above varied in thickness from 10 to 50 feet, with the midnight sun of the Arctic shining in varying degrees through the blue ice. At 11:15 p.m. EDT on August 3, 1958, Commander Anderson announced to his crew: "For the world, our country, and the Navy--the North Pole." The Nautilus passed under the geographic North Pole without pausing. The submarine next surfaced in the Greenland Sea between Spitzbergen and Greenland on August 5. Two days later, it ended its historic journey at Iceland. For the command during the historic journey, President Dwight D. Eisenhower decorated Anderson with the Legion of Merit.

Here is the New York Times reporting the same journey.  Some relevant extracts:

He recounted briefly how the Nautilus had cruised submerged on a northerly course past the Aleutian Islands and through the Bering Strait between Alaska and Siberia toward the brittle fringe of the ice pack and then beneath it.

Above the Nautilus the covering icecap was plainly visible over the vessel's closed-circuit television, the sixth months period of Arctic daylight making visibility no problem. Now and then great holes appeared in the icecap but the Nautilus sped on....

...Commander Anderson indicated a distinct lack of curiosity about the precise make up an penetration of the icecap below the surface of the sea. It ranged in thickness from ten to fifteen feet and loses about three feet of its winter depth in summer. But pressures caused by wind and tide, sent it to a depth of fifty feet in unchartered places and these were well above the submarine, he explained....

...A humorous note crept into the recitation as Commander Anderson gave the first public definition of what he called "longitudinal roulette," a passtime not to be indulged in while traversing the arctic sea for the first time in a submarine.

"A trip across the North Pole, where there is no opportunity to observe anything outside of the ship, no opportunity to observe stars or do any type of electronic navigation, presents a very formidable problem- or what has been up to now a very formidable problem," the skipper explained.

"For example, it would be possible for a ship equipped with conventional navigation equipment to become so confused at the North Pole that they might actually work themselves around in a slow circle, thinking that they were going in a straight line, and end up coming into perhaps the ice-locked coast off Greenland, or even more disappointing, back where they came from."

I doubt Commander Anderson would have imagined back then that not much more than sixty years later, the Arctic would not only be able to be traversed by submarines, there would be commercial shipping routes opening up - without ice-breakers or with only occasional help from them.

From the Wall Street Journal, ships transporting oil and gas through the Arctic, which is quite a worry, given the huge risks posed by commercial shipping in the Arctic, from Seatrade Global.

Now go and check out Neven's excellent blog for the latest on the Arctic sea ice.