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It is good news that the climate scientists, PhD’s, children, tourists and media are finally safe on board the Aurora Australia (though I note the webcam this morning still shows that boat surrounded by sea ice). Spare a thought for the sailors still on board the Shokalskiy.
Shub Niggurath writes to me today to explain that the ill-fated ship headed back to an area heavy with ice, knowing a storm was approaching. The ships captain had wanted to get away sooner, but was delayed because the expedition team was late returning due to a mechanical mishap. The details of that delay are below. Further down I note a New Zealand writer argues they were taking “undue risk” because sea ice data and wind data were available that “shows the ice didn’t come out of nowhere – nor from a sudden chill.”
Pierre Gosslin asks on his site why the organizers used a cheap “ice strengthened” boat that was not able to break ice, yet sold berths to inexperienced tourists, and ventured into major sea ice zones.
Looks like the Antarctic team was unlucky to get nice weather with less wind. I marvel that the Commonwealth Bay and Cape Denison area […]
LATEST NEWS: Aurora Australis abandons attempt to save Akademik Shokalskiy in Antarctica. The SMH headline could’ve said “Another icebreaker abandons attempt to save climate scientist’s boat in Antarctica.” UPDATE: Russia says 54 of 74 passengers to be helicoptered off if weather permits. (h/ tPeter Miller) The Polar Star icebreaker has left from the US to come help. It will take 8 -9 days to arrive. (Guardian)
Welcome to Media-Sport, where we score points watching a part of the media dance around the hysterical folly of an Antarctic climate science expedition trapped in sea ice for six nights (and counting). The Art of Propaganda is not just in the telling of one-sided lines, but is crafted through parts left unsaid.
More global warming, it is everywhere you look. View from Akademik Shokalskiy
With three ice-breaker rescue ships trying to reach them, the latest news is that the scientists and media entourage may have to abandon ship and be helicoptered to safety (though right now even that is not possible due to the very rough weather). The ABC news home page at time of posting this has zero references to “Antarctica”, but does say there are cracks in ice around a […]
Whatever happened to polar amplification?
The oceans are apparently warming, and yet the sea-ice abounds in the Southern Hemisphere. A new record was set at 19.57 million square kilometers of ice [NSIDC-nrt], around one million more than the usual amount. (Yesterday ice covered 19.11m km2).
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Source: http://iup.physik.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr2/
National Snow and Ice Data Center Web site. Records date back to October 1978. NSIDC also has a similar graph of daily sea-ice-extent.
The size of the sea-ice surrounding Antarctica is spectacular. We can just see the outline of the landmass here to appreciate just how much of the Southern Hemisphere is covered with sea-ice right now.
8.6 out of 10 based on 93 ratings […]
Antarctic Sea Ice has hit it’s 23rd daily record for the year. (Thanks to Sunshine Hours for tracking these things.)
2013 is the red line. (click to enlarge)
In terms of the number of daily records in a year, the Big Year for sea-ice was 2008 where records occurred on 125 days. 2010 was nearly as “big” when records occurred on 118 days. 2013 is currently in fifth spot. If the tally rises to 28 records this year, it will leap to third place.
Not that any of this matters, of course.
“Sea ice in the Arctic and around Antarctica responds directly to climate change and may, if properly monitored, become increasingly important for detecting climate change.”
IPCC Third Assessment Report, Cryosphere Processes, Box 7.1
8.5 out of 10 based on 90 ratings […]
It’s difficult to say anything for sure about Antarctica because the weather is so variable. Bumper snow one year, not so much the next. (Noise and uncertainty is large). But 800 years of ice cores spread across Antarctica shows the Surface Mass Balance (SMB) is more likely to have been increasing over the last century. (Which fits with what Zwally et al found in 2012 with ICESAT satellite data).
Note the correlation of the smoothed average of the SMB (orange line) with Total Solar Irradiance (green line).
Antarctic Ice has been increasing for the last half century, and over 800 years it correlates with solar radiation. TSI: Total Solar Irradiance (Click to enlarge) Fig. 5. (A) Mean normalised stacked SMB anomaly time series at the continental scale, calculated as described in the text (black line with positive and negative values filled in with red and blue contours, respectively) and the 40-yr central running average smoothing (orange line). The green line represents the normalised TSI anomalies, and the corresponding ±1 uncertainties are indicated by the green vertical bars.
H/t: HockeySchtick and Jaymez
A paper published today in The Cryosphere finds Antarctica has been gaining surface ice and snow accumulation […]
In a move of Olympian audacity, Seth Borenstein keeps a straight face and shamelessly shifts to pretending that more Antarctic sea-ice fits their climate change theory. Yet again climate models fail to predict things in advance, they only do the post modern type of prediction — the bury-my-bewilderment type, after the fact. Once more, nothing can disprove the theory of man-made climate catastrophe.
The oceans are warming, but that now means less sea ice in the Arctic, and more sea-ice in the Antarctic. Of course!
Shifts in wind patterns and the giant ozone hole over the Antarctic this time of year — both related to human activity — are probably behind the increase in ice, experts say. This subtle growth in winter sea ice since scientists began measuring it in 1979 was initially surprising, they say, but makes sense the more it is studied.
The only point of science is to predict things. But when alarmist predictions turn out to be wrong, Borenstein and co don’t adjust the theory, they pretend post hoc that the new results “fitted” all along, and radiate collective amnesia about the hundreds of times they “experts” predicted the opposite.
Antarctic sea ice hit record highs […]
While stories of the Arctic record fall in sea-ice have been all over the news, all over the world, it’s almost as if the Southern Hemisphere didn’t exist. Right now, this week apparently, the sea ice is at or near record highs (bearing in mind that we’re still only talking 30 years of satellite records, but then, these are the same satellites lapping over the arctic, and if the records are longer there, I expect it’s only by an hour and a half).
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h/t Steve Goddard who asks when the National Snow & Ice Data Centre ( NSIDC) will send out the press releases. They appear to be more concerned about the effects of the Antarctic “thinning” trend on penguins this week. Sunshine hours has graphed it in detail.
Cryosphere compares the relentless fall and rise of Antarctic ice here. Millions of square kilometers in staggering, dramatic melts every spring manage to return in staggering dramatic ice formations each and every year.
(Click to enlarge)
I expect that our non-hemispherist unbiased and diligent newspapers will be running with matching ones very soon. Based on news stories like this:
8.9 out of 10 based on 84 ratings […]
What do you know? The Medieval Warm Period, which either “didn’t exist” or “only happened in Europe”, also hit Western Antarctica.
Booth Island and Mount Scott are also on the Antarctic Peninsula. Photo: Stan Shebs.
The climate models don’t know why the world was warmer 1000 years ago. They don’t know why it cooled into the Little Ice Age either. The models don’t do regional projections well, and they don’t do seasonal projections with any skill, and they (in the last ten years) don’t work on short decadal timeframes either, but surely when it comes to big global temperature changes the models have got all the major forces figured out? Surely they’d be able to predict large movements across the entire globe eh? — but the first test we come to, a mere thousand years ago, shows the models have a predictive ability not significantly different from a coin toss.
Just because it was warmer 1000 years ago (due to some other reason), doesn’t mean that CO2 isn’t responsible for this warming cycle, but when all the evidence for CO2’s guilt comes only from models that can’t get the last warming cycle right, and from argument from ignorance (“Our […]
Ever wondered how the whole planet could suddenly “get warmer” during an El Nino, and then suddenly cool again? William Kininmonth has the answer. As I read his words I’m picturing a major pool of stored “coldness” (bear with me, I know cold is just a lack of heat) which is periodically unleashed on the surface temperatures. The vast deep ocean abyss is filled with salty and near freezing water. In years where this colder pool is kept in place we have El Ninos, and on years when the colder water rises and mixes up near the surface we have La Ninas. The satellites recording temperatures at the surface of the ocean are picking up the warmth (or lack of) on this top-most layer. That’s why it can be bitterly cold for land thermometers but at the same time the satellites are recording a higher world average temperature, due to the massive area of the Pacific.
In other words, just as you’d expect, the actual temperature of the whole planetary mass is not rising and falling within months, instead, at times the oceans swallow the heat on the surface and give up some “coldness”. At other times, the cold […]
Dr Andrew Glikson (an Earth and paleoclimate scientist, at the Australian National University) contacted Quadrant offering to write about the evidence for man-made global warming. Quadrant approached me asking for my response. Dr Glikson replied to my reply, and I replied again to him (copied below). No money exchanged hands, but Dr Glikson is, I presume, writing in an employed capacity, while I write pro bono. Why is it that the unpaid self taught commentator needs to point out the evidence he doesn’t seem to be aware of? Why does a PhD need to be reminded of basic scientific principles (like, don’t argue from authority). Such is the vacuum of funding for other theories that a debate that ought to happen inside the university obviously hasn’t occurred. Such is the decrepit, anaemic state of university science that even a doctorate doesn’t guarantee a scientist can reason. Where is the rigor in the training, and the discipline in the analysis?
Credibility lies on evidence
by Joanne Nova
April 29, 2010
Reply to Andrew Glikson
Dr Andrew Glikson still misses the point, and backs his arguments with weak evidence and logical errors. Instead of empirical evidence, often […]
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