Global Sea Ice “Comeback” Conspiracy

Our Twitter feed has suddenly been inundated with messages to the effect that:

Global sea ice makes a strong comeback as El Nino fades.

First up was Professor Judith Curry on April 12th, with:

You will note that we were not the only ones to swiftly conclude that Judy’s assertion was lacking both veracity and verisimilitude! Then this morning came our old friends at the Global Warming Policy Forum with:

You will note that the GWPF adorned their “Tweet” with a graph purporting to show “Global sea ice anomalies”. We can only assume that Benny Peiser hadn’t read this April 11th article of ours, which pointed out that:

NSIDC has suspended daily sea ice extent updates until further notice, due to issues with the satellite data used to produce these images. The problem was initially seen in data for April 5 and all data since then are unreliable, so we have chosen to remove all of April from NSIDC’s archive.

To remedy that (no doubt?) inadvertent oversight on Benny’s part here is a graph we prepared earlier of absolute global sea ice area using reliable data from the AMSR2 instrument on the Japan Aerospace eXploration Agency’s SHIZUKU satellite:

2016-04-12-UH-AMSR2-Area

The GWPF were followed this afternoon by Anthony Watts with:

Both Prof. Curry and non Prof. Watts adorned their “Tweets” with a graph allegedly comparing “global temperature” with “tropical temperature”, but provided no graph of “polar temperature”. To remedy that (no doubt?) inadvertent oversight here is one we prepared earlier:

NCEP-Arctic-T2-DJF

All members of this team of synchronised “Tweeters” provided links to an April 11th article by a certain Paul Dorian entitled, believe it or not:

Global Sea Ice Makes A Strong Comeback

Note in particular the part of Paul’s article that states:

In an interesting twist, the recent analysis found that the global ice area remained stable throughout the 1980s and the 1990s, while temperatures climbed suggesting “the global sea ice area is not particularly a function of the global average surface temperature.” [Source: Willis Eschenbach/”Watts Up With That” web site]

We can only assume that Paul Dorian hadn’t read this April 10th article of ours, which pointed out amongst other things that:

One feels compelled to ask why Willis’s global average temperature graph neglects to mention 2015 when he implies that it does?

Here’s an up to date version of one of those that Bill The Frog prepared for us earlier:

HadCRUT-201602

We must further assume that Paul hadn’t read this April 11th article by Mr. Watts either. It stated that:

A few years ago in 2009, I was the first to notice and write about a failure of the instrumentation for one of the satellites used by the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) to show Arctic Sea Ice extent. Today, we have what appears to be a similar problem with satellite sea ice measurement.

It seems that Paul Dorian has finally read at least one out of all these informative articles, because the latest revision of his own piece of imaginative fiction now starts:

The source of global sea ice information cited in this posting was NOAA’s National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). They are now reporting issues with the satellite data used to produce these images and this information was not known at the time of the writing of this article.

Do you suppose we can now expect a similarly “fulsome apology” from the other players in this tragi-comic farce, together with all their rebloggers, retweeters, plagiarisers and other assorted acolytes?

6 thoughts on “Global Sea Ice “Comeback” Conspiracy

  1. The most worrying element in this virtual holy war about the climate in general are the rebloggers, retweeters, plagiarisers and other assorted acolytes.

    People do not read the articles, do not check the resources, they act like algorithms in their crude beginning. They pick up a few words in a text they want to find and just repeat, retweet etc.

    Professor of le faux pas – @Judith Curry. Maybe she likes to be ridiculed in public? I have to admit you need some courage to behave like that.

  2. I have followed the Arctic ice since 2007 and have downloaded most of the NSIDC SIE maps since the beginning of June 2012. So I think I can make an educated guess about what the new map should look like. Suddenly half the Baltic Sea froze and then unfroze in a couple of days and mysterious fields of broken up ice floes appeared in the Barentsz Sea and south east os Salakhin Island. Meanwhile both global and Arctic temperatures were at record highs. Now it is nearly fifty years since I started my ‘A’ level physics course, but I do seem to remember that as the temperature rises ice melts. I also remember, as a chemistry undergraduate, studying the infra red spectrum of CO2. (In those days, it used to absorb in the IR, though many on websites now aver, often in capitals, that it is NOT a greenhouse gas.) In my engineering career I have even come across sensors that developed faults!

    However, who am I to argue with such an august body as the GWPF or an author erudite enough to write for wattsupwiththat.com? Where I am in Colorado, it is snowing, which just totally proves GW is a hoax. Were I still living in Portsmouth, I’m sure I would be gawping at all those icebergs that are now clogging the English Channel.

    As for Judith Curry, I think of her as rather a pitiful case. She started out with promise but she has become a scientific laughing-stock as she attempts to spin the increasingly obvious as its exact opposite. Her motto should be “Fidem rerum semper vincit.” “Belief always conquers facts.” Come to think of it, that would be a good motto for the GWPF, though a much less charitable person than myself might suggest that “Fidem” should be replaced by “Pecunia,”

    1. It’s a pleasure to meet another engineer Syd! As luck would have it I live quite near the English Channel. It may be snowing in Colorado, but I’m afraid I have some bad news for you. I see no icebergs!

      If you’ve studied the infra red spectrum of CO2 perhaps you wouldn’t mind explaining it to a certain Radical Rodent of this parish? He doesn’t seem to care much for my explanation. Fidem rerum semper vincit?

      Regarding Judith Curry and the GWPF, I fear I am far less charitable than you.

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