I expect to see posts that say that this study is a waste of time and that Mark Serreze of the NSIDC and NSIDC itself must need their funding renewed. After all it is a big conspiracy.

PH will post about Greenland being -67.

I also expect to see the "global" Sea Ice Anomaly chart as well.

What some fail to realize is that although sea ice area may be larger than last year, the thickness of the Arctic ice is what counts.

Given that 2/3 of the Arctic ice melted last summer, it seems a safe assumption that 2/3 of the current ice is less than one year old. I figured that out without using any taxpayer money.

Great article on the origins of global warming -
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles%202007/GWHoaxBorn.pdf

This is all very interesting and can be spun as scarry if you don't consider history at all.
We have all seen enough posts about similar Ice melting in the 20s and 30s.
My question is:
Is not this whole situation completely consistant with a gradual natural warming as we recover from the LIA?
And would we not expect this melting after all the soot and polution from Siberia etc?

It does not seen necessary to apply CO2 warming theories to get these results.

There are more than enough natural influences to explain them.

The latest solar cycle 24 projections have it firing up in May, 2008. Not to be confused with similar ones from July, 2006. Look for a big change in the sun in the next 36 hours before May starts.
http://www.spaceweather.com/images2008/29apr08/midi512_blank.gif?PHPSESSID=o2ns3t4lhrrd5phrp41hmbj895

May AO forecasts not looking so good for Arctic melting either.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/daily_ao_index/ao_index_ensm.shtml

Last spring Brett commented on the very warm water in the North Atlantic around Greenland. That isn't looking so good either this year.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/sst/ani-weekly/5.gif

I'd put some pretty low odds on Mr. Serreze' predictions, though I doubt he would be willing to bet.

So the questions are how thick is young ice and how thick is old ice? This was not addressed in the article. Does 10 feet of new ice melt faster than 10 feet of old ice?

Reply: I saw a report that thin ice (1 year old or less) can be up to a meter thick, while the older 5 year ice can be up to 2-3 meters thick.

Patrick,

Actually I think its greater than 2/3. Since the extent of Arctic Sea Ice in Mar 08 is greater than that in March 07, there must be MORE new ice this year than last so you end up with more than 2/3 of it being less than a year old.

Anon,

Yes, what you said makes perfect sense. However, how would Al Gore have become a millionaire, excuse me, billionaire without the carbon credit scam?

Patrick Henry,

Got to keep that funding coming in.

GaryB,

One out of three ain't bad. Why don't you help the cause and by riding your bicycle to work and turning off your air conditioning this summer?

Interesting article. It will be even more interesting to see what happens this year as the loss of ice seems to be concentrated east of Greenland while the Aleutians keep frozen.
After looking at the article I have 2 questions

1. Who is proof reading these articles?

The graph on figure 2 is inaccurate compared to the written text. One can wonder about this being a sign of sloppy work or is being consciously misrepresented because the ice max would be much closer to the average than last years ice max. The Arctic Ice extent for 2007-08 never crosses the 15 million kilometer line (I would say the graph shows an approx. max of 14.75 million square kilometers) but the words accompanying the graph say the max should be 15.21.
Hmmm???? Could the graph be altered to make it look closer to 2006-2007 max of (approx 14.25) than the 79-2000 average max of 15.55????
In any case the graph does not match the written data. It gives one a chance to question both science and motive.
The part I like the best is
“Arctic sea ice reached its yearly maximum on March 10, 2008, at 15.21 million square kilometers (5.87 million square miles).”
and
“Average sea ice extent for March 2008 was 15.2 million square kilometers (5.9 million square miles).”
Let’s see according to their calculations:
15.21 million square kilometers = 5.87 million square miles
And
The Average for March was 15.2 million square kilometers = 5.9 million square miles?????
A quick question!

2. Is this another example of Hansonian math or are the authors actually saying 15.21 is smaller than 15.2 or is 5.87 larger than 5.9?
I suppose averages like land temperatures can be altered to fit whatever one wants to show.

This is just an observation of material presented with no implication of shoddy “peer review” or “graph manipulation” being made.
Junk produced and published is still junk no matter where you read it.

Folks read, look, ask questions, learn and think for yourself.

Gary B.
Poor PH is has been reduced to doing daily weather reports from the coldest place on the planet everyday. Ice has not only left the Arctic, but there is a new island in Greenland called Warming Island, because they never new it existed before; until it just appeared a couple of years ago.
Now scientists are worried about the emission of methane beneath the perma frost around the arctic circle. It's to bad that more people don't embrace the concept of AGW, and use their energies to stop it. Even arch capitalists like PH now see the economic wisdom of this choice.
KIPP

This may be scary to a person who believes it's unprecedented. But the arctic sea ice has melted before and so it will again. The Russians say it melts on a 70-year cycle, so that's probably what occurred last summer.

It was warmer during the Medieval Warm Period and much warmer during the Holocene. The arctic sea ice recovered from those warm periods, the polar bears did not go extinct and neither did the narwhal.

BTW: This study may not have been necessary because of the previous studies that showed the amount of melting last summer. The high amount of new ice shows that quite a lot of new ice formed this winter. The percentage of older ice would be HIGHER if less new ice formed this winter. Is this much to do about nothing?

First off the maps can't be totally correct because in spots in the western edge you have locations in 2007 that show 1 year old ice and in the same spots in 2008 it shows 5-6 year old ice. And to some extent it looks like since 06 the ice is growing on the one chart but on the map you would never know it. And if the map is correct there was alot of ice melt and if the sea level rise is to come from this why has the sea levels not changed?

Monthly Weather Review for November 1922

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.

Hi Gary B,

You say you come from a cattle raising family. Does the fact that all the animals come to the same place to drink indicate a "conspiracy" on their part?

Also, I'm not aware of the form of water which melts at -67. Please enlighten me.

yet still the NH ice is still melting at a slower rate than last year. Don't be surprised if it doesn't even come close to last years melt
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.jpg
anf then of course there is winter 2009. Sea ice index people always trying to emphazise how the NH ice is melting and saying SH ice is just normal!
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.south.jpg
They will most likely be hoisted by their own petard sooner rather than later. Cooling is here just check April temp data

Maps show the difference in 2 years, what do maps from 2002-2003 look like or 1998-1999, 1988-1989, 1977-1978 or so on, doubtful that there is accurate maps for the earlier years, so we are basing all of this on a few years, the earth is 5 billion years old, been colder, been warmer and now this is something. Accurate data and even now it is not all that does not go back many years. What about Antartic sea ice growing, it has been said that this usually proceeds artic sea ice. But thats right antartic sea ice is growing due to global warming, nothing natural, everything has to do with global warming no matter what, if theres a few cold winters they say just the weather you can't base a few years on that that is not climate, but then a few warm winters they say the climate is changing. This is such a small period of time and to base and project catastrophic happenings is totally absurd and to believe them well.......everybody says bring up Greenland well why not, and occurences like this have happened in England, Scotland, where once was cold then warm now colder, and it took many, many years to happen and this is before co2, so why was there periods of not just cooling but warming also, climate factors, sun, earths orbit and tilt. It really will take an ice age for some to believe that perhaps this is a natural occurence and the bad part is we won't be able to blog about that, well probably not. Global warmers sure have selective hearing.

Oddly PH has stopped linking Arctic sea ice graphics. A few months ago it seems like he was doing it a couple of time per week. Hmm. Attention span problem?

Brett, you might want to add in the current NSIDC extent graphic since the one in the report looks to be close to a month old. Perhaps PH can interpret it for us.

Reply: Thanks Steve. I will update it.

PH:
Excellent link. Well written, Well researched, Well referenced.
Seem like somthing an energenic investigative reporter should be given to see what they can do with it.
Any suggestions:
anyone.

Hi Guys,

A tad OT but it looks like the AGW party is twinkling away. PDO shift to cool phase confirmed.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2008-066
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/04/29/nasa-pdo-flip-to-cool-phase-confirmed-cooler-times-ahead/

Hi Brett,

Not sure what to make of this article as a few things are no brainers after the melt of last year. Seems it was a cold winter in most of the Arctic this winter and that the ice that has built up from nothing can only be thin regardless of how cold it was. It has got to start somewhere to build back up again. We shall see what we shall see from what takes place this summer as to whether or not it is going to all disappear again and there is no net gain. Believe current thinking is that there will be an actual gain in ice and that the melt will not equal last years.

Thanks Jim,
I read the release earlier this week. I wondered how long it would take the JPL to make it official. I thought back in January during the strongest portion of the current La Nina that the North Pacific finished its transition. Willis' recent report on global SSTs earlier this winter confirmed that our oceans -esp the Pacific started cooling about 4 years ago. Doesn't look good for California agriculture.

The biggest criticism I see in most of the comments on this site is that all of these cyclical temperature events have occured in the past and without any influence from us humans. That is true, but I want to provide a report on a couple of those natural geologic events that occurred before we came on the scene to provide some perspective of what can happen with or without us.

The following quotes come from the attached web link:

http://www.sqwalk.com/blog/000235.html

"There are enormous quantities of naturally occurring greenhouse gasses trapped in ice-like structures in the cold northern muds and at the bottom of the seas. These ices, called clathrates, contain 3,000 times as much methane as is in the atmosphere. Methane is more than 20 times as strong a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide."

"A temperature increase of merely a few degrees would cause these gases to volatilize and "burp" into the atmosphere, which would further raise temperatures, which would release yet more methane, heating the Earth and seas further, and so on. There's 400 gigatons of methane locked in the frozen arctic tundra - enough to start this chain reaction - and the kind of warming the Arctic Council predicts is sufficient to melt the clathrates and release these greenhouse gases into the atmosphere."

"The most recent of these catastrophes occurred about 55 million years ago in what geologists call the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), when methane burps caused rapid warming and massive die-offs, disrupting the climate for more than 100,000 years."

"The granddaddy of these catastrophes occurred 251 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, when a series of methane burps came close to wiping out all life on Earth."

"More than 94 percent of the marine species present in the fossil record disappeared suddenly as oxygen levels plummeted and life teetered on the verge of extinction. Over the ensuing 500,000 years, a few species struggled to gain a foothold in the hostile environment. It took 20 million to 30 million years for even rudimentary coral reefs to re-establish themselves and for forests to regrow. In some areas, it took more than 100 million years for ecosystems to reach their former healthy diversity. "

"In both cases, a temperature increase of about 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit, about the upper range for the average global increase today's models predict can be expected from burning fossil fuels by 2100."

Now to the current time. We can continue to debate as to how much of a direct influence we are having on the latest 0.5C rise in temperatures for the past 130 years or so. The actual amount of our contribution of pollution and landscape changes may or may not be the direct cause of a potential cataclysmic event, but can you really say with conviction that our influence isn't just simply a part of the necessary catalyst to begin a chain reaction of natural events similar to what happened in the past?

The fact that we are monitoring an increase in methane and CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere and because bigger increases have happened in the past, a lot of you say we should simply ignore these relatively small changes going on currently and go on with our lives and just hope for the best because "we didn't cause the problem in the first place, and these natural temperature variations ocur all the time." Well the near extinction of all the species on earth also happened in the past under similar circumstances that likely started out slowly at first before accelerating in the final years as a chain reaction developed.

Many of you also bring up the past events to prove your point of nothing to worry about because they simply occured before, but then at the same time ignore the same warning signs from those past events that they could be occurring again either with or without our direct influence (or catalyst) to start them. The point is how long do we wait while these events begin to play themselves out during the next 50-100 years?

Kipp:

Your "Warming Island" was mapped as an island in the 1950s. So much for "Global Warming" and truth.

Reply: Here is a new followup to that story from the New York Times.........

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/28/arctic-explorer-rebuts-critique-of-warming-island/?hp

IT IS GLOBAL BOTTLING OF THE H2O RESOURCES!! JUST LOOK AT THE SHELVES OF ANY SUPER MARKET OR 7-11s. The water is being locked out to cycle. Less water, thinner ice!

Again my "Tunnel" idea restores the area and thickness of the Arctic Sea Ice. Computer modeling will verify this.Anyone interested in computer modeling them let me know?

Some details on the Arctic sea ice thickness:

'Julienne Stroeve of the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, US, proceeded to detail the latest thinking.

'"The ice loss penetrated much further into the central area than ever seen before [in summer 2007]," said Stroeve. "There was some recovery in the extent of winter ice in 2007/2008 but it was still well below normal."

'According to Stroeve, there were also anomalies in ice concentration, with levels abo