[diemos]

The people who have the power to do something about climate change are the leaders of our governments. They're the ones who have both the responsibility ad the power to take action and do something.

Lordy. Did you see the level of hysterics at being asked to wear a mask. Do you think any politician could survive the shitstorm that would come from being asked to make actual sacrifices and lifestyle changes? Of course no leader actually does anything. We will simply go on with business as usual until reality grabs us by the hair and drags us kicking and screaming into the future.

[dissident]

Basically a guaranteed fail. When the pain becomes palpable to the masses, it is game over.

[Plantagenet]

The people who have the power to do something about climate change are the leaders of our governments. They're the ones who have both the responsibility ad the power to take action and do something.

Lordy. Did you see the level of hysterics at being asked to wear a mask.

There was an editorial about this in WSJ just today........And once again it was largely our so-called leaders who to blame for the hysterics. Who will ever forget Dr. Fauci in early 2020 lying to Americans and telling them they didn't have to worry about Covid and wearing a mask was unnecessary , while at the same time he was emailing his professional collegues and taking a more rational tone. Then Fauci flip-flopped and told people Covid was dangerous and they should wear masks but by then the damage was done. And then, a few months later Fauci was telling people to wear TWO masks.

Which was it....0, 1 or 2 masks? What did the science say? We sure never got a straight answer from Dr. Fauci.


Blame nincompoops like Dr. Fauci for the confusion about masks. It really would've helped if he had acted like scientist instead of a manipulative politician and just told people the truth from the very beginning instead of flip flopping and changing his recommendations over and over again.

Do you think any politician could survive the shitstorm that would come from being asked to make actual sacrifices and lifestyle changes? Of course no leader actually does anything. We will simply go on with business as usual until reality grabs us by the hair and drags us kicking and screaming into the future.

There have been plenty of politicians that have "survived" far worse then telling people the truth about climate change. Of course those are great men, like Churchill who had to tell the British people to make enormous sacrifices to fight the Nazis.

The problem today is that we don't have great men like Churchill running things.....we've got fools and worse like Al Gore and Obama and Biden just lying to people and pretending they are fixing the climate change problem when they aren't, and utter fools like Trump who won't even acknowledge its a problem.


We need a great leader like Churchill to tell the truth about climate change and the need for sacrifice ....instead we've got liars and fools like Al Gore, Obama, Trump, John Kerry and Joe Biden covering up the truth and pretending we can continue BAU indefinitely .

Cheers!

[Azothius]

As always, projecting what the arctic sea ice minimum might look like poses a complex puzzle.
There's a nice, lively debate over at
https://forum.arctic-sea-ice.net/index.php/topic,3447.1700.html#lastPost
with one poster predicting that we're going to have a recovery year for the ice and others critiquing his observations and assertions.

One of the sticking points seems to be that as the condition of the ice continues to deteriorate, the models for estimating the thickness and volume of the ice are increasingly inaccurate.

Right now it seems we have the lowest Extent on record for this date. But the Area is middle of the road relative to recent years. And the Compaction is exceptionally high as compared to recent years.

see the charts here: https://cryospherecomputing.tk/NRT2.html

[dissident]

It is time to drop these area coverage diagnostics. They are a distraction. The measure I would like to see is the sea ice mobility. That is, how fast is the sea ice circulating in a given image pixel. I can guarantee that this is increasing over time as the average depth of the ice decreases. The only thing useful in the current list observations is the semi-empirical metric volume. But it is based on assimilation into a model which will be affected by how well the model represents the circulation. Ocean models have traditionally done a worse job than atmospheric models since the size scale of dynamical features (e.g. Rossby waves and the all-important gyres) is very small (tens or hundreds of meters). This means enormous computing resources are required.

I have read a peer-reviewed article that the current crop of ocean models all fail to be in the "resolution converged" regime. That is changing the grid resolution leads to substantial differences in the simulations. Not just expected chaos noise, but intensity of key currents, etc.

[JuanP]

Latest NSIDC report:
https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

"At the end of the first week of July, Arctic sea ice extent was tracking at record low for this time of year. July is the month with most rapid sea ice decline. As in most of the years in the past decade, June saw rapid ice loss in Hudson Bay, Baffin Bay, the Siberian coast, and the Chukchi Sea. However, ice remains extensive north of Alaska."

Maybe we will have a new all time record low Arctic sea ice extent, or maybe not, but I don't expect anything extreme unless the Arctic Ocean weather goes berserk before the melting season is over. It's all up to the weather now.

[Tanada]

Latest NSIDC report:
https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

"At the end of the first week of July, Arctic sea ice extent was tracking at record low for this time of year. July is the month with most rapid sea ice decline. As in most of the years in the past decade, June saw rapid ice loss in Hudson Bay, Baffin Bay, the Siberian coast, and the Chukchi Sea. However, ice remains extensive north of Alaska."

Maybe we will have a new all time record low Arctic sea ice extent, or maybe not, but I don't expect anything extreme unless the Arctic Ocean weather goes berserk before the melting season is over. It's all up to the weather now.

While that might be technically true the same date in 2011 and again in 2020 was only a hairs breadth higher than 2021.

[Tanada]

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[evilgenius]

. I ask myself about the PR value of a totally melted out Arctic. There's no doubt it is high. Even your average right-wing Southern Baptist might agree about the reality of climate change once that happens. I hope by then it isn't too late.

Your "average right-wing Southern Baptist" is totally irrelevant to doing anything about the climate change.

The people who have the power to do something about climate change are the leaders of our governments. They're the ones who have both the responsibility ad the power to take action and do something.

But unfortunately from Clinton and AL Gore to Obama to Biden, they say nice things but they do essentially nothing. Trump didn't say nice things and he also did nothing.

Take Obama.....even if you ignore the key role he played in derailing the rather good UN Climate Change Treaty scheduled for signature in Copenhagen in 2009, Obama deserves full blame for the disastrous fraud of a climate treaty that he and other world leaders foisted on the world in Paris in 2015. A treaty where everybody wishes that global warming not exceed 2°C is utterly meaningless and worthless....even worse it provides cover for doing nothing while CO2 emissions and global temperatures go up and up.

Its already too late to do anything about climate change----not because of some ignorant nobody in the south, but because people like Clinton and Gore and Obama and Trump and Biden have failed the people of the world and failed to do their job to protect us and the planet.


Clinton and Gore and Obama and Trump and Biden all say they're taking care of climate change....but all they are doing is putting out a lot of hot air

Cheers!

I somewhat disagree with you. I don't think any politician can do anything without the people behind them. When you see politicians step out and make those kinds of commitments, they are hoping for that support. If they get it overwhelmingly, then their names will go down in history. If not, then they get criticized. And the criticism is partially valid because they are supposed to be effective enough leaders that if they believe in something they will be able to get the people behind them. But that depends upon convincing your average Southern Baptist. Remember, flames seek to expand everywhere, but the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

[JuanP]

August 3rd NSIDC report:
https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

"The rate of Arctic sea ice loss was somewhat slow through much of July, lowering prospects for a new record low minimum extent in September. The month as a whole was marked by widespread low pressure over most of the Arctic Ocean, which was much more extensive than recorded for June."

Arctic sea ice extent is now slightly above the 2012 level for this date making it less likely that we will have an all time low record this year, but it is still all up to the weather during what remains of the melting season.

[Tanada]

August 3rd NSIDC report:
https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

"The rate of Arctic sea ice loss was somewhat slow through much of July, lowering prospects for a new record low minimum extent in September. The month as a whole was marked by widespread low pressure over most of the Arctic Ocean, which was much more extensive than recorded for June."

Arctic sea ice extent is now slightly above the 2012 level for this date making it less likely that we will have an all time low record this year, but it is still all up to the weather during what remains of the melting season.

Yup. Been following the Arctic and Antarctic Sea Ice stories since 2007 and if I have learned anything in all that time it is that local weather effects strongly dominate what happens in any given year.

If you go back and look at individual years 2005 had the first statistically unusual low ice number but this was quickly forgotten when 2007 was so very much lower than 2005. @008 was close to 2007 but then 2009 and 2010 demonstrated what a summer with a more ice retention weather pattern looked like. 2011 came along and was a virtual tie with 2007 but then 2012 set a real new all time record. Since 2012 we have been more or less lucky as so far we have not broken that deep draw down of old ice in a single event.

However just because we have not set a new low area or low extent record in nine years does not mean things are recovering to the 1979-1999 average type of numbers. Of those nine years four were higher than 2007 which naturally means 5 were lower or equal to 2007 and only one came anywhere near the long term average. Of those only 2013 and 2014 were completely within 2 standard deviations of the 1981-2010 thirty year average. The remaining years have not been completely outside the 2 SD limit but every one of them has deviated for weeks at a time below that limit. This is considered "statistically significant data" and the truth is now that the data for 2020 is firmly reviewed we should have switched to a new 30 year average from 1991-2020 which with the changes seen since 2005 will reflect a lower ice average. If you just look at minimum for each year and ignore all the squiggles where different years are lower for some period but not lower at minimum only one year, 2020, fits firmly between 2012 and 2007. Every other year for the last 9 seasons has clustered above or below 2007 rather than closely approaching the 2012 minimum.

I still expect to see a "blue ocean event" within my lifetime if I make it as long as my parents lived I have about another 30 years of life expectancy because I come from a generally long lived family on both sides. However I think based on the numbers I just reviewed 2007 was the real benchmark and 2012 and now 2020 are the lower outliers from the new climate system that asserted itself in 2005. In the last 15 years the average age and therefore the resistance to further melting of the sea ice especially in the Arctic has declined to a very low number. You used to be able to easily find rafted ice that was as much as 20 seasons old along the coast of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and northern Greenland island. Today you might only find ice that is 5 season old or younger in those same locations because all of the old tough ice has either melted in place or been expelled into the north Atlantic where it melted as it entered warmer temperate weather zones. By the same process the average thickness of the Arctic sea ice has declined to the point where weather effects can now completely dominate the melting season where the thick old ice was far more resistant to short cycle weather events.

[theluckycountry]

The trend is clear and each season approaches the anomaly of 2012

[JuanP]

Thanks, Tanada!
I would be amazed if we did not experience a blue ocean event before 30 years. I expect it to happen in this decade, but you can't go wrong allowing 30 years for it to happen.

[Plantagenet]

I somewhat disagree with you. I don't think any politician can do anything without the people behind them. When you see politicians step out and make those kinds of commitments, they are hoping for that support. If they get it overwhelmingly, then their names will go down in history. If not, then they get criticized.

When a politician is unwilling to take action against an existential threat like climate change because he is afraid of "criticism" then that politician is both a coward and a moral cretin.

And, unfortunately, moral cretins are what we mostly have for political leaders.

And, even worse IMHO, are the political leaders who refuse to take action but p r e t e n d that the phony treaties and accords they craft will actually do something to mitigate against climate change. In this camp fall the liars like Biden, Obama, Gore etc. who pretend that the Paris Accords or the Kyoto Accords will somehow help against climate change when in actuality they do nothing. These people are hypocritical liars as well as cowardly moral cretins.


When it comes to climate change, our politicians today are hypocritical liars and cowardly moral cretins.

Cheers!

[Tanada]

Over the last two weeks the rate of decrease has slowed so far that the total extent numbers are now far above the same dates for 2007 and 2012. It would take something truly unprecedented for this year to suddenly dip to the point of entering record territory as we are now getting numbers that were common back in 2010 when the ice pack first recovered from the 2007 record year.

[JuanP]

Over the last two weeks the rate of decrease has slowed so far that the total extent numbers are now far above the same dates for 2007 and 2012. It would take something truly unprecedented for this year to suddenly dip to the point of entering record territory as we are now getting numbers that were common back in 2010 when the ice pack first recovered from the 2007 record year.

Most certainly!

Here is August 18th's NSIDC Arctic Sea Ice report and a chart and maps showing today's Arctic Sea Ice Extent:
https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

"Sea ice loss during the first half of August stalled, though ice in the Beaufort Sea is finally starting to weaken. The Northern Sea Route appears closed off in 2021, despite being open each summer since 2008."

I also read this interesting article on CNN:
"Greenland expedition discover 'world's northernmost island'"
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/gree ... index.html

"Scientists last month set foot on a tiny island off the coast of Greenland which they say is the world's northernmost point of land and was revealed by shifting pack ice."

[theluckycountry]

And what is the point of the NSIDC 1981~2010 Median measure? It reminds me of real estate institute price measures that are sculptured to give a positive outlook. God forbid they went with 1981~ 2020 and included all the bad years

[dissident]

The fixation on sea ice cover is strange. This is the only graph that matters:



It does down in fits and starts but it is going down. A time will come when the mean sea ice thickness is too small to give any sea ice extent according to the definition. Sea ice a few inches deep will be disrupted by wind and waves. The wave action will jump catastrophically once the ice sheet stops being an ice sheet.

[Plantagenet]

The fixation on sea ice cover is strange. This is the only graph that matters:

Actually, the albedo of the Arctic ocean is a function of how extensive the sea ice cover is. Yes, the extent of sea ice is closely related to sea ice volume but it isn't the same thing, and for climate modeling the sea ice extent is the data you want.


As global warming continues Arctic Ocean sea ice extent is reduced and the area of open ocean increases. As a result, the albedo of the entire Arctic ocean basin is reduced during the summer melt season. This produces a significant positive feedback effect that amplifies global warming

Cheers!

[dissident]

The albedo effect of ice cover is well known. The issue is that people use sea ice extent which is defined as some fraction of ice in a pixel of the satellite image as a measure of the state of the sea ice cover. Albedo has precisely zero relevance to this. People will be shocked when the sea ice cover starts to collapse much earlier in the summer season after a short transition period. All of their gazing at the 2D metric will not give them any idea that this transition is coming.

So comparisons of sea ice cover from different years are not the best measure of what the actual state of the Arctic sea ice is.