NASA providing the video: the above is an interesting fact. The maximum extent of the Arctic sea ice was the “sixth smallest” recorded in 35 years of satellite observation.
As you watch the video you can see some amazing images:
- An August 2012 cyclone helped break up the sea ice, sending a large pack into warmer southern waters
- Ice north of Alaska was subject to fracturing, with cracks in the ice “hundreds of miles long” – most likely due to thinner sea ice
Each year, the sea ice maximum gets smaller, this year it reached its maximum of 15.13 square kilometers on March 15. As the National Snow and Ice Data Centre notes, the ten lowest maximums have occurred in the last ten years:
Arctic sea ice reached its maximum extent for the year on March 15 at 15.13 million square kilometers (5.84 million square miles). This year’s maximum ice extent was the sixth lowest in the satellite record (the lowest maximum extent occurred in 2011). The ten lowest maximums in the satellite record have occurred in the last ten years (2004 to 2013).
Such data puts to rest the “temperatures have plateaued” nonsense. You can see the 2013 maximum against the 1979-2000 median:
Such data puts to rest the “temperatures have plateaued” nonsense.
Watching the Deniers 
We’re obviously well into a new ice age.
“The maximum extent of the Arctic sea ice was the “sixth smallest” recorded in 35 years of satellite observation”
volume? lowest Jan, 2nd lowest Feb. hey that’s a recovery. where is watts when you need him ? .
Well,that’s the thing…you don’t need Watts at all. Every Watts post is an attempt to divert or mislead, or simply dumb, like his latest effort on the exceptional day extent of Greenland surface ice melt last NH summer. The puerility is typical ‘Greenland melt was weather not climate’…Earth to Watts: weather happens under conditions of warming,static,or cooling trends in climate,always did always will.
Extent John – I’ll tidy it up later. Thanks for catching the lack of clarity.
That geoff brown at no carbon tax socialist commie party is a classic liar
commented on his post re Hansen
before posting my comment he rewrote the post
john byatt
April 4, 2013 at 5:50 pm
see how geoff changed the wording after my comment from
“As a Government employee he shouldn’t have taken part in protests.
as i copied 5;26pm to later
As a Government employee he shouldn’t have taken part in illegal protest
so make that two lies from the nctcsp
http://uknowispeaksense.wordpress.com/2013/04/03/csp-climate-sceptics-party-or-communist-and-socialist-party/#comment-4298
Lets see if I’ve got this right – you see dangerous global warming in a bit of melting arctic ice (but don’t mention the Antarctic!), which could be caused or at least exacerbated by industrial pollution http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2011/20110418_blackcarbon.html , and dubious measurements of the temperature of the ocean depths.
God of the gaps.
A few more winters like this year’s, and noone in the NH will take your doomsday cult seriously.
Meanwhile you give Watts a free pass on his fraudulent ocean temperature graph manipulation. The source of your ‘dubious’ ocean temperature claim!
Can you even spell hypocrite Eric?
his ignorance is legend.
Nothing fraudulent about drawing a flat line which fits between the error bars.
80% loss of arctic volume since 1979.
No, you don’t get to draw random lines between error bars. That’s propaganda, not statistics.
“The God of the Gaps” is you Eric, in your deliberately wrong descriptions of events you want to trivialise. ‘A bit of melting ice’ indeed!…
Then you accept black carbon as a pollutant,but not excess CO2! Is it something about the particle size? Whatever,it does not make sense,as that distinction does not pass even basic industrial regulation standards
A few more torrential rain events like Argentina’s [400mm in 2 hours at La Plata] and more out of whack winters [in spring!] and even the dimmest will start thinking. Even you.
Antarctica ice sheet loss 220GTS a year
http://www.nature.com/news/global-warming-expands-antarctic-sea-ice-1.12709
note , Antarctic mentioned
eric does not mention that the full NH winter temperature was average.
probably does not fit the spiel
eric is the fat one
Hilarious – global warming melts ice in the North, and expands ice in the south.
Magic stuff, the gerbal warming.
You’d know why too, if you were a true sceptic. But, you’re not.
Yep, a bit more sea ice in the south,while southern land ice contracts,even in Antarctica. “What’s going on?” .blubs Eric
Since you should have been unable to avoid the technical explanations for what is being seen in the southern sea ice,unless you have a medical certificate stating you have been in an induced coma for the last five years, the only possible explanation for your posturing is that you are an ideologically motivated dismissive.
Met reading
http://www.met.reading.ac.uk/~sgs02rpa/latest.html#ROSE
In other words, they got the predictions wrong, but you should still believe them.
FFS, you guys still haven’t found a tropospheric hotspot, yet you refuse to ditch models which predict one. Instead you create fanciful theories about how you could have missed it.
Never let a fact get in the way of a beautiful theory.
Or as the great physicist Freeman Dyson says:-
“The climate-studies people who work with models always tend to overestimate their models,” Dyson was saying. “They come to believe models are real and forget they are only models.”
haven’t you made yourself enough of a laughing stock this week,?
The idiot is claiming that one of the negative feedbacks is missing
At least you’re not accusing Dyson of being in the pay of big oil.
But even you can’t deny Dyson is one of the giants of 20th century physics – one of the founders of modern Quantum Physics. If he says there is a problem with the science behind predictions of climate catastrophe, he deserves a hearing.
” If he says there is a problem with the science behind predictions of climate catastrophe, he deserves a hearing.”
why don’t you post here what he is saying the problem is with the science eric because most high school students could explain his lack of understanding
,
Dyson is as relevant to climate as Pauling was to vitamin C. I must just ask my mechanic what he thinks of my heart surgery. Silly deniar meme.
The tropospheric hot spot is there. Of course it does not present like the idealised one in models,as thoughtful folk would understand. It’s smeared more broadly.
Then there is the cooled stratosphere,which is a more specific diagnostic of a CO2 accumulation. And all the other distinctive signs.
“They come to believe models are real…” Dyson asserts without evidence..”..and forget they are only models”.. A redundancy given the first half of the assertion. Eric cites Dyson’s clumsy sentence in a classic argument from authority: Dyson is a physicist thus he can pass for a climatologist.
Really, Dyson’s comment is staggeringly stupid…but Eric has to make do with such nonsense rhetoric, because his cupboard is bare of real information.
Dyson
Dyson is well-aware that his “heresy” on global warming has been strongly criticized. In reply, he notes that “[m]y objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much,
Really, Dyson’s comment is staggeringly stupid…but Eric has to make do with such nonsense rhetoric, because his cupboard is bare of real information.
Other than the lack of any actual warming of course.
Dyson is well-aware that his “heresy” on global warming has been strongly criticized. In reply, he notes that “[m]y objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much,
He’s calling BS on poor scientific practice – but we knew that already, from the Climategate emails.
Real scientists don’t hide declines, they try to explain them.
Poor old Freeman D,being wheeled out by Eric to re-run some silly remark years ago–a remark that was silly at the time and remains so now– that he has not repeated. What’s Dyson talking about now? It probably makes more sense that Eric ‘lack of warming even though the system shows warming continues’ Worrall.
You’re a broken record,Eric. We already knew that.
Real scientists did not hide declines,they noted them and published them. Real skeptics can read. Rejectionists are beyond reach.
Once again, you prove my point about the bareness of your cupboard.
Freeman Dyson’s selective vision
Filed under: Climate Science Greenhouse gases — david @ 24 May 2008
In the New York Review of Books, Freeman Dyson reviews two recent ones about global warming, but his review is mostly shaped by his own rather selective vision.
1. Carbon emissions are not a problem because in a few years genetic engineers will develop “carbon-eating trees” that will sequester carbon in soils.
Ah, the famed Dyson vision thing, this is what we came for. The seasonal cycle in atmospheric CO2 shows that the lifetime of a CO2 molecule in the air before it is exchanged with another in the land biosphere is about 12 years. Therefore if the trees could simply be persuaded to drop diamonds instead of leaves, repairing the damage to the atmosphere could be fast, I suppose. The problem here, unrecognized by Dyson, is that the business-as-usual he’s defending would release almost as much carbon to the air by the end of the century as the entire reservoir of carbon stored on land, in living things and in soils combined. The land carbon reservoir would have to double in size in order keep up with us. This is too visionary for me to bet the farm on.
2. Economic estimates of the costs of cutting CO2 emissions are huge. In an absolute sense, this is true, it would be a lot of dollars, but it comes down to a few percent of GDP, which, in an economic system that grows by a few percent per year, just puts off the attainment of a given amount of wealth by a few years. And anyway, business-as-usual will always argue that the alternative would be catastrophic to our economic well being. Remember seat belts?
Why is it that Dyson’s remarkably creative powers of vision (carbon-eating trees for example) fail to come up with alternatives to the crude and ugly process of burning coal to generate electricity?
3. The costs of climate change are in the distant future, and therefore should be discounted, in contrast to the hysterical Stern Report.
I personally can get my head around the concept of discounting if the time span is short enough that it’s the same person on either end of the transaction, but when the time scales start to reach hundreds and thousands of years, the people who pay in the future are not the same as the ones who benefit now. Remember that the lifetime of the elevated CO2 concentration in the air is different from the lifetime of CO2 to exchange with the biosphere. Release a slug of CO2 and you will increase the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere for hundreds of thousands of years. The fundamental tenet of civil society is to protect people from harm inflicted by others. Are we a civilized species, or are we not? The question is analogous to using economics to decide whether to abolish slavery. I’m sure it was very costly for the Antebellum Southern U.S. to forego slave labor, but it simply wasn’t an economic question.
4. Majority scientists are contemptuous of those in the minority who don’t believe in the dangers of climate change.
I often find myself contemptuous of efforts to misrepresent science to a lay audience. The target audience of denialism is the lay audience, not scientists. It’s made up to look like science, but it’s PR. We have documented Lindzen’s tortured and twisted representation of the science to non-scientists here and here. If Lindzen had a credible argument to support his gut feeling (and apparently Dyson’s), I can promise that I for one would take it seriously. I’ve got kids at home whose future I worry about. If Lindzen were right, no one would be happier about that than me. But I do get contemptuous of BS.
Dyson http://deepclimate.org/2009/06/16/freeman-dysons-shadowy-canadian-connection/
dyson crash and burn, point by point
http://initforthegold.blogspot.com.au/2007/08/dyson-exegesis.html
never realised just how far out of touch with reality he is,
facepalm
dyson
“The warming is real, but it is mostly making cold places warmer rather than making hot places hotter. To represent this local warming by a global average is misleading.”
Dyson is as relevant to climate as Pauling was to vitamin C. I must just ask my mechanic what he thinks of my heart surgery. Silly deniar meme.
Dyson is as relevant to climate as Pauling was to vitamin C. I must just ask my mechanic what he thinks of my heart surgery. Silly deniar meme.
I see – Dyson’s reputation as an innovative and capable scientist, which has won him global acclaim, his record of achievement which puts him among the greats of physics, and his deep knowledge of the physics of radiative transfer, which were critical to the success of the Manhattan Project, mean we should disregard him completely when he says other scientists are making mistakes.
FFS Dyson practically invented the field of radiative scattering – his contribution is still honoured by the Dyson Series, named after his work, which describes the scattering of radiation through air and other particles (e.g. water droplets).
http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/printmember/dys0bio-1
dyson
Dyson proposed a “mental component of the universe,” and continued, “If we believe in this mental component and call it God, then we can say that we are small pieces of God’s mental apparatus.”
eric is an extremely small piece
” FFS, Dyson practically invented the field of radiative scattering”
FFS, he did not.
Shit !
25% of the MYI remaining on Dec 2nd was advected from the Central Arctic through Fram strait by Mar 28. This occurred in less than 4 months, and the process is ongoing.
Compare this with climate models that assume an annual figure of 10% advection of MYI, and you will understand that we are witnessing the Arctic sea ice death spiral.
The drain is Fram strait, and it is unplugged
at Nevens
Yawn. Let me know when its all gone.
Let me know when you think of a better response.
eric I see – Dyson’s reputation as an innovative and capable scientist, which has won him global acclaim, his record of achievement which puts him among the greats of physics, and his deep knowledge of the physics of radiative transfer, which were critical to the success of the Manhattan Project, mean we should disregard him completely when he says other scientists are making mistakes.
well eric that is why he accepts the greenhouse effect, accepts the warming but has this silly notion that only cold places will warm, basically he is out of his depth and guessing admitting that he knows very little about climatology
, yawn let us know when the ice age starts
Dyson, who made fundamental breakthroughs in the theory of radiative scattering, who worked side by side with Feynman and Teller, says alarmist climate scientists are scr*wing up.
You can:-
a) Conclude he is a senile old fool who has probably been bought off by the big oil machine.
b) Listen to what he has to say – maybe he’s right.
c) Argue from authority that he is right.
(b) what that only cold places will warm?
out of his depth
The old coot is undoubtedly a towering figure in physics,but he did attempt the false dichotomy of saying that money spent of AGW was essentially divered from noble social causes. How AGW falls outside the category ‘social causes’ is anyone’s guess. Someone should tell him that even a fraction of the money the sociopathic rich have salted away in tax havens could be helping the cause as well.
d) Evaluate what he says, taking into account all of the evidence, and determine he is wrong.
Dyson hypothesis
only cold places will warm until they are hotter than the hot places which then will be the colder places which will then warm more than the hot places ,,, ad infinitum
sad to see this happen to him,
yawn let us know when his paper is published
possibly like eric he thinks that god knows just how we like it
watched the show about earth weather last night,
loss of Arctic ice,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,BAD
great moments in science
eric worrall
“Because the Earth’s climate is tremendously good at stabilising itself, ”
eric iris hypothesi
” gets hot, thunderclouds come along, it rains and gets cool and then
the thick clouds block the iris or sun or whatever that big shiny thing is and all the heat goes out the chimney due to the non existent hot spot”
eric “FFS Dyson practically invented the field of radiative scattering”
which makes him 118 years old this year
started on it at age one
Meanwhile, more denier delusions from Willis E at WUWT. He seems to think it’s not CO2 that’s causing global temperatures to go up, it’s the occasional landing of aeroplanes at remote airports.
http://blog.hotwhopper.com/2013/04/denier-weirdness-its-not-co2-its.html
I wonder what he thinks is causing the arctic ice to disappear? (Maybe occasional polar bear landings?)
then a strange thing happened , all the aircraft stopped flying in 1997 and the UHI effect magically transferred to the Arctic
Seriously. No, really, seriously.
Not even close to being wrong.
Polar bear farts??
Eric,
As I have previously stated, you are incapable of thinking critically.
What is fraudulent is drawing a horizontal line and passing it off as a trend line to mask the fact that the data is clearly trending up.
If you can’t see that you have no credibility. (But we knew that)
Reverend Watts says it was a highlight (lying scum). Perhaps Brother Erric can explain to us all what the good Reverend was highlighting? Saint Anthony appears unable to oblige.
James Hansen op ed
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-hansen-keystone-obama-20130404,0,3169887.story
Eric on Climatology: “Sloppy and error ridden science”
Eric in action:
Links to Wattsonian ice maps (which he never looked at) to prove ice cover has varied as much in the past as now. (It hasn’t)
Links to a graph of ocean SURFACE temperature to prove that DEEP ocean hasn’t warmed (Doh! mega face palm!)
Defends the use of fake trend lines to “hide the incline”
Cherry picks the hottest year last century to start his “hasn’t warmed in 17 years” meme
Eric leading by example……:-D
H Y P O C R I T E
Eric has it warmed due to aircraft landing at airports and UHI?
if so, has your, no warming been due to closing down all airports and de-urbinisation in the last 17 years?
August 26, 2012 at 2:49 am
Dear WUWT
I guess I owe the world a humble apology for personally contributing so much to the urban heat island in Antarctica, and hence to misinterpreted climate records.
The badly sited meteorological screen in your photo is at an Australian summer camp in the Northern Prince Charles Mountains, near Mt Jacklyn – in the background. Temperatures measured here were for local information of pilots and field parties only – it is useful to have an idea of how many layers of clothes to put on before exiting your Antarctic shelter. Temperatures here were only measured for less than 2 months over a couple of seasons and have NEVER been used for any climate record.
This photo was taken in the 1988/89 austral summer when I, and a colleague Andy, lived in the UNHEATED shelter nearest to the meteorological station. I didn’t realise that I was so hot that my body heat could influence temperatures measured on the Antarctic Peninsula, thousands of kilometres away. It must have been Andy!!!
Yes, a funny moment in the series ‘WUWT’s death by a thousand embarrassments’.