"This thinner, younger ice makes the Arctic much more susceptible to rapid melt," James Maslanik said. "Our concern is that if the Arctic continues to get kicked hard enough toward one physical state, it becomes increasingly difficult to reestablish the sea ice conditions of 20 or 30 years ago."

This, of course, assumes that the temperatures and polar ocean and air circulation remain constant or increase. There is no mention of what was happening to the ice back in the 20s and 30s. Or for that matter during the Medieval Warm Period. Strangely enough the Arctic Ice Cap recovered from those warm periods.

Of course one can fully expect that other like minded individuals will suggest this has nothing to do with increasing levels of CO2.

Except for Alaska and parts of Western Europe I think we can conclude that highly significant cooling has set in on land surface temps for at least 50 days now (to date). I have been following COLA climate predictions for a year now and they are usually very accurate (I wonder why they ain't been quoted by the AGW crowd aren't they part of NOAA? LOL)I dont need to cherry pick any more its all over the place and I don't think it can be explained by La Nina only
see:
http://wxmaps.org/pix/temp1.html (USA)
http://wxmaps.org/pix/temp2.html (Canada)
http://wxmaps.org/pix/temp3.html (mexico, central A)
http://wxmaps.org/pix/temp4.html (WEst Europe)
Nearly ALWAYS CONSTANTLY WARMER (me thinks Gulf Stream salinity effect. This is very long term and noticeable and significant but very confined, so NOT global)
http://wxmaps.org/pix/temp5.html (east Asia)
http://wxmaps.org/pix/temp11.html (central Asia)
http://wxmaps.org/pix/temp6.html (south Asia)
http://wxmaps.org/pix/temp7.html (australia always cooler when it rains east and warmer when high blows warm dry winds over west)
http://wxmaps.org/pix/temp8.html (South America has been like this for the last 12 months with southern part experiencing extreme cold events)
http://wxmaps.org/pix/temp9.html (Middle east (this is getting scary LOL)
http://wxmaps.org/pix/temp10.html (Africa been like this for at least 12 months also)
Either COLA is wrong GISS is wrong, NOAA is wrong ect or they are all wrong or one is right? Please try to explain the(above) just remeber the predictions have been mostly spot on.
Cheers

I already posted thisonthe previous thread, but there were alot of comments on that one, and this particular blog entry is exactly what I'm talking about.

From Jeff Master's blog on weatherunderground

Arctic sea ice remains near record low levels
December 2007 Northern Hemisphere sea ice extent was the second lowest on record for the month of December, 13% below its extent in 1979 when satellite measurements began, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. December was the second straight month that a new monthly minimum Arctic sea ice record was not set, following a string of five months in a row where monthly records were set. However, the December 2007 sea ice extent was very close to the record low extent set in 2006, and the ice is much thinner than it was in 2006. This will likely cause a very early melting season and a probable return to record lows by April.

I'm bummed.

Also, if there's worry about people getting a false impression from the ice's areal extent, why don't they just start reporting the volume of the sea ice. This seems an mimportant stat for me, as I assume that the ice's perserverence into the warm months must at least partially be a function of total ice mass (and thus volume) in any given region, not just ice area.

Anyway, unless something amazing happens in February, I don't expect any major new sea ice production this year. Barring avery cool spring and summer, the arctic ice cap should be in for a disaster this year.

Sigh

On a finalnote assuming that the rest of the arctic ice cap magically disappeared this summer, what do you guys think would happen. Would we notice an immediate impact in the rest of the Northern Hemisphere's weather? I've heard predictions by some (I don't know how educated they are ) that we would see a major increase in snowfall around the periphery of the arctic basin, due to the fact that there would be a much greater extent of free water available for evaporation into the air. However, I have not heard any reliable reports of increasd snowfalls around the areas where arctic ice has already melted off. Does anyone have any thoughts? Reply: That would make sense to me, especially during the late August to October period.

Like the ice, weather, climate, and everything else has always been static.

" it becomes increasingly difficult to reestablish the sea ice conditions of 20 or 30 years ago."

Who decided that 20-30 years ago was some perfect set point anyway?

20 to 30 years ago was 1968 to 1978 and some ding bat was predicting the next ice age because there was too much ice and cold.

I have a great idea!

Let's go back to where there was too much ice and start measuring from that point so we can show a huge decrease in ice and really make it look like some disaster.

.

A heavy snowfall blanketed a global warming protest in Annapolis. 400 activists urged lawmakers to pass the nation's toughest greenhouse gas control law, a bill that would mandate that all businesses in Maryland cut emissions of global warming pollution 25 percent by 2020 and 90 percent by 2050.

90 percent! 18 legislators actually signed up to co-sponsor the bill. How delusional are these people? God help us.

http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/local/bay_environment/blog/2008/01/global_warming_protest_snowed.html

Does anyone really fall for this mess?

The last blog was

2007 was 5th Warmest on Record Globally

"Temperatures over the past three decades have risen an average of 0.6 F per decade."

Now this blog:

Young, Thin Sea Ice replacing Old, Thick Ice

"In the mid-1980's, that figure was 35%
Ice that was older than 7 years made up 21% of the multi-year Arctic Ice cover in 1988
it becomes increasingly difficult to reestablish the sea ice conditions of 20 or 30 years ago."

They must play this crap for kids. Kids are the only ones that will not remember the 1970's ice age.

20 or 30 years ago, we were all afraid we were going to freeze to death.

Another discussion of the Arctic Oscillation as one of the causes of the exchange of old Arctic sea ice with new:

Ignatius Rigor of the Polar Science Center Applied Physics of the University of Washington made a presentation about the Arctic Oscillation (AO) at the 14th Working Meeting of the IUCN/SSC Polar Bear Specialist Group. The proceedings are available here if you're interested in reading 198 pages about Polar Bears.

http://pbsg.npolar.no/docs/StirlingDerocher-WildProf-2007.pdf

Check the links in that pdf file (right-hand column, second paragraph) for: Proc_Seattle05.pdf. I tried posting a direct link, but couldn't get it to work.

They report he presented, "The AO is a significant factor explaining 52% of the variance in sea level pressure during the winter and 36% in the summer. During low AO conditions (1980s), the sea ice in the Beaufort Gyre circulates for over 10 years. By comparison, during high AO conditions (1990s), the recirculation time decreases to 3-4 years. During an extreme high AO in the early 1990s, most of the old ice in the Arctic was flushed out through Fram Strait, new ice formed off Alaska that was re-circulated more quickly and conditioned the ice for greater melt because it was thinner than the previous multi-year ice. Younger, thinner ice persists in the Arctic. Much of the variance in sea ice extent (e.g., >50% in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas, >80% in Russian Arctic) can be explained by the age of the ice." He later commented about the press only latching onto temperature as the cause for the reduction.

Polar amplification, Arctic Oscillation, new ice replacing old ice... Arctic sea ice has so many things working against it it's a wonder there was any to begin with.

BTW, the polar bear group reported, "...the IUCN Red List classification of the polar bear should be upgraded from Least Concern to Vulnerable based on the likelihood of an overall decline in the size of the total population of more than 30% within the next 35 to 50 years. The principal cause of this decline is climatic warming and its consequent negative affects on the sea ice habitat of polar bears. In some areas, contaminants may have an additive negative influence."

You know, it's really depressing to see how a falsehood can take on a life of its own. We have two people here repeating the old urban myth that scientists in the 1970s thought that an ice age might be coming. That's poppycock. If you'd like to see a short debunking of this urban myth, look here. It includes links to several longer explanations of what really happened.

About two thirds of the Arctic ice melts and refreezes every year.

If the prevailing wind blows from the Bering Strait, the ice traverses towards the Atlantic and melts. This study would seem to have established that that journey takes about 2-3 years.

On the other hand, a prevailing wind from the other direction causes the ice to remain trapped in the Arctic Basin, because the only escape route is through the very narrow Bering Strait.

The average age of the ice is probably determined by the rotation of the Arctic Oscillation. If the ice extent goes up from last summer's level, how will the CO2 borg react? They made such a big deal about the decline last year, and no doubt their words will come back to haunt them this year.

Finally, I'll be able go ice fishing without having to use that cumbersome eight foot extention on my ice auger.

Ahh! The Gods of angling have shone their light on me today, with that information.

Now, don't go ruining my pleasure by going up there and throwing a trillion freezer coils in the water to thicken up the ice, or some other assanine man-made idea to rectify the situation.

Hey cbm. A thought on the Arctic Basin snowfall. Up yonder in the Great Lakes Basin there is the Great SNOW CONE MAKER called lake effect. It accounts for the majority of snowfall in upstate & western New York. Seems to me under the right conditions it could do the same thing up there in the Arctic.

This is actually rehashing old news. We already knew the ice levels were very reduced last summer. It remains to be seen if the ice will melt to the same levels this summer. While this artical suggests the ice will be thin and remelting will be swift, I have my doubts, because the La Nina apparently is bottling the cold air up at the poles and the ice, although "new," is likely to be thicker.

I expect fellow bloggers to produce at least ten links to the artical about the harbor in Greenland freezing for the first time in ten years. Although this is a very local effect, it does show that the cold is serious up there this winter.

Check out the latest (January 14) predictions about the current La Nina at

http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/lanina/enso_evolution-status-fcsts-web.pdf

The latest change in this model (and of course we can't fully trust models) is that the cool anomaly does not go away next fall, but actually starts to turn down again next fall. By that time the cool anomaly has spread further west, all the way to China. The last time a cool anomaly persisted a very long time was 1949-1952, towards the end of the last warm phase of the AMO.

It will be interesting to see if the melting is as severe this summer, or whether we have reached a high point of the cycle and things are turning the other way.

vincent,

Nice links! Given that nearly every location in the world is expected to be well below normal the remainder of the month, we can certainly expect to see a lot of red in the GISS and NOAA maps!

cmbclean,

You should really take a trip to Siberia if you are worried about the Arctic. Then you will have some real problems to take your mind off the imaginary ones. I had no idea that it was possible for humans to survive in these kind of un-earthly temperatures. You could get frostbite in a matter of a few seconds at -83F.
http://www.wunderground.com/global/stations/24688.html?MR=1
http://www.wolfcreekski.com/snow.asp

It is bitter cold where I live, yet nearly 80 degrees warmer than Siberia.

-65° F | -74° F
-54° C | -59° C

[Overcast]
-70° F | -83° F
-57° C | -64° C

[Scattered Clouds]
-70° F | -81° F
-57° C | -63° C

[Partly Cloudy]
-70° F | -76° F
-57° C | -60° C

[Scattered Clouds]
-61° F | -68° F
-52° C | -56° C

�Telltale signs are everywhere �from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest. Since the 1940s the mean global temperature has dropped about 2.7� F.� � Climatologist George J. Kukla of Columbia University in Time Magazine�s June 24th, 1975 article Another Ice Age?"

Chris Crawford: I tried your link but couldn�t get it to work. Just ran across this one at Wattsupwiththat.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,944914,00.html

Hadn�t run into this "Time" article before.

cbm, since we are talking computer models, the only one that closely models the ice extent of the last Ice Age requires a relatively warm and ice free Arctic Ocean. The low humidity allows for lots of moisture to be taken up and lots of precipitation over the Arctic, including Siberia, Greenland and Canada. The reflection from the ice and snow leads to a drop in temps which allows for more buildup until we get an ice sheet that doesn't melt (sometimes just over the Arctic Ocean and surrounding land) which gives us a cooldown.

Of course, you can check what happened last year to see how much of that precip fell (amazing, a model that offers real world predictions in our lifetime, but then it isn't AGW driven). Part of this model does include diversions of the "conveyor" system to allow more relatively warm water into the Arctic to sustain the melt. Big difference even though the AGWers stole that idea. After all, this concept was created and developed by young earth creationists and ignored for quite some time.

Chris, would you mind repeating your link to the site that debunks the "70's ice age" myth? The href to your link seems to have been lost during the submission process.

According to GISS data, the period from 1920-1940 was warmer in Greenland and Iceland. Also, the rate of warming prior to 1930 was at least as great as the 1990s.

Iceland's largest city is colder than the 1930s and 1940s
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=620040300000&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1

Greenland's largest city is colder than the 1930s and 1940s
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=431042500000&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1

The other Greenland sites with continuous records back to the 1920s
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=431043600000&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=620040630003&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1

So what is the connection between the poles? The Antartic ice is relatively high and the Artic ice is relatively low. What it is the conection? Is the south pole cooling off? Will this cooling at the SP cool the tropics which will then allow the NP to cool?

Is that how the heat transfer works

Just wondering???

I investigated the GISS site a bit more, and discovered some more surprising facts.

There are no GISS stations in Africa or South America with long-term records going back 90 years. The only GISS stations in the Arctic with long-term records are the ones I mentioned previously - and they all show that the period 1920-1940 was as least as warm as the present.

There is one other long-term Arctic station in Siberia, which appears to be broken. Around 1987 it stepped upwards about 3 degrees, usually a sign of an equipment or environment change.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=222249590007&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1

The questions that comes to mind are, how can NASA claim that current Arctic warming is unprecedented, when the bulk of the long term data shows otherwise? And how can NASA make any long-term claims about most of the rest of the world, when they are lacking any data?