Earlier today the National Snow and Ice Data Center announced that:
On September 11, Arctic sea ice likely reached its annual minimum extent of 4.28 million square kilometers (1.65 million square miles). The 2024 minimum is the seventh lowest in the nearly 46-year satellite record. The last 18 years, from 2007 to 2024, are the lowest 18 sea ice extents in the satellite record…
Note that this is a preliminary announcement. Changing winds or late-season melt could still reduce the Arctic ice extent, as happened in 2005 and 2010. NSIDC scientists will release a full analysis of the Arctic melt season, and discuss the Antarctic winter sea ice growth, in early October.
Consequently several of the usual cryodenialospheric suspects have been frantically spinning their webs of deceit around the announcement.
First up was Javier Vinós, who beat the NSIDC’s starting gun by firing a broadside on X (formerly Twitter) on Sunday. If you’re unfamiliar with the name, Javier frequently pontificates about Arctic sea ice, amongst other things, on Judith Curry’s “Climate Etc.” blog. He confidently announced that:
Arctic sea ice reaches its annual minimum with an extent greater than in 2007, 2012, 2016, 2019, 2020 and 2023.
The two warmest years in a row at > +1.5°C have ZERO IMPACT on the 17-year resilience of Arctic sea ice.
Needless to say, “Snow White” felt compelled to quibble:
Peter, a welcome new denizen here at the Great White Con Ivory Towers, appears to have parachuted into our far north summer hideaway on the shores of Santa’s Secret Summer Swimming Pool straight from Tony Heller‘s Unreal Climate Science blog.
Prompted by Peter I wandered over to Tony’s place where I found to my surprise that he has recently been busy warming up an old chestnut of his that has been debunked numerous times over the past decade. Allegedly:
Between 1990 and 2001, the IPCC rewrote the Arctic sea ice satellite record, and changed a trend of ice increasing to ice decreasing.
Here’s a previous chestnut rewarming event preserved for posterity:
You really have no idea what you're talking about, do you Tony?
Sadly Tony’s side of the “debate” has been deleted by the powers that be at Twitter, so here are the two graphs in question, combined by Mr. Heller into one illuminating animation:
I posted this comment on Tony’s blog last night (UTC), but he hasn’t got back to me yet:
Neither has anybody else. That’s probably because this morning my words of wisdom are still only visible to Tony and I?
[Edit – October 5th]
Progress at long last! Vegieman directs the attention of Tony’s band of merry (mostly) men to:
However for some strange reason he neglects to mention that Tony’s link labelled “2001 IPCC Report” doesn’t lead to that graph!
[Edit – October 9th]
Not a lot of people know that since things have gone quiet at Tony’s place I popped into Paul Homewood’s echo chamber, where rewriting the Arctic continues apace:
Not a lot of people know that our headline for today (apart from the terminating question mark) has been shamelessly plagiarised from Paul Homewood’s latest Arctic article. This will give you a flavour of Paul’s purple prose:
Electroverse have uncovered some blatant data tampering by DMI:
“It would appear that the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) may have taken a leaf out of NASA’s ‘data-fudging 101‘.
Sometime between late-Nov and early-Dec this year, the DMI’s Arctic Sea Ice Volume chart experienced a mysterious ‘vanishing’ of ice — this is revealed by a direct comparison of the Nov 18th and the Dec 8th charts below.”
I am able to corroborate their findings. In September I took this screenshot of DMI sea ice thickness. Note that the black line for this year was close to the 2018 line, and above 2017 for Sep 20th:
But the new version shows this year well below those two years:
There is no other way to describe this than blatant fraud. The changes do not appear to have been even documented, and the old data is not archived, being simply “replaced”. These should surely be very basic scientific requirements.
Neither does there appear to have been any public announcement by DMI about the fact or the justifications for what amounts to a significant change.
What this episode means is that DMI can no longer be trusted to produce honest, reliable data. It also raises the question of whether similar tampering has been carried out in previous years, without anybody being aware. After all, it is only by pure accident that it has been spotted this time.
Even fewer people know that my helpful explanatory comment is currently invisible to Paul’s band of merry (mostly) men:
Should anyone contrive to click on the invisible link this what they would see just below the DMI’s recent Tweet:
Quite predictably Tony Heller has also jumped on the self same bandwagon, claiming in an article entitled “Rapidly Disappearing Arctic Ice” that:
On December 4, DMI showed Arctic sea ice volume above the 2004-2013 average:
Quite predictably, the data disappeared for three days, and now that it has returned, DMI has massively reduced the amount of sea ice in the Arctic. Much of the thick ice off the coast of Siberia has disappeared:
In normal circumstances I would of course point out the error of his ways to Tony via Twitter. However:
Here is the DMI’s explanation for the recent change in their Arctic sea ice thickness/volume visualisations, as shown on their “Polar Portal” web site:
New graphics December 7, 2021
We have improved the DMI operational ocean and sea-ice model HYCOM-CICE with higher horizontal resolution and updated HYCOM and CICE code. In particular, the sea ice code has been greatly improved with meltponds, sea-ice salinity, improved thermodynamics and much more. The freshwater discharge from Greenland has also been greatly improved using freshwater product from GEUS, which especially improves the coastal ocean currents and thus the ice transport nearshore Greenland. The model has been running continuously since September 1990. Therefore, we have by December 07, 2021 updated the graphics of sea-ice thickness and volume using the new and improved data on Polarportal and ocean.dmi.dk.
The improved model setup has led to higher variability as well as less abrupt melting during the melt season, which gives a shift of approximately half a month for the time of minimum ice volume. The trend between the years is almost unchanged. Thereby, a year with a large sea-ice volume in the old setup also has a large volume in the new setup, and similar for years with low sea-ice volume.
I always thought that “skeptical” folk didn’t much care for the output of “climate models” but I guess I must have been mistaken?
[Edit – December 13th]
Needless to say my comment at NALOPKT is still invisible this evening. However credit where credit is due. Tony Heller has at least not censored my comments on his blog. Earlier today Watts Up With That referred to both the Heller and Homewood DMIGate2 articles. Do you suppose the following helpful comment of mine will ever see the light of day at WUWT?
Watch this space for more #DMIGate2 news as and when we receive it!
A few days ago we posted an article about the recent surge in the amount of disinformation being published about Arctic sea ice. Eventually one of our long list of usual suspects, Anthony Watts, published a copy of an erroneous Arctic article by Paul Homewood.
Now the Watts Up With That Arctic porky pie production line is going into overdrive, so here’s an already long list of its output in the run up to the COP26 conference in Glasgow in a month or so. First up is the aforementioned clone from NALOPKT. Allegedly:
It is very easy to show that Arctic sea ice has stabilised. As their graph itself shows, there have only been three years since 2007 with lower ice extent than that year, and eleven have had higher extents. Also the average of the last ten years is higher than 2007’s extent.
In itself, this is too short a period to make any meaningful judgements. But that is no excuse for the Met Office to publish such a manifest falsehood.
This comment of mine on that article remains invisible at WUWT:
Who would have thunk it?
Not a lot of people know that @wattsupwiththat has just repeated Paul Homewood's allegations that @MetOffice has been economical with the truth about #Arctic#SeaIce.
Neither Paul nor Anthony have seen fit to publish my response yet:
There isn’t a million more square kilometers of ocean covered with ice than at the same time last year. Or is there?
For our younger readers perhaps I should point out that is a reference to the genesis of the Great White Con blog way back in the mists of time in September 2013, when a Daily Mail headline proudly, but erroneously, declared that:
And now it’s global COOLING! Record return of Arctic ice cap as it grows by 60% in a year.
With the COP26 conference due to start in Glasgow on October 31st UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson had this to say to the United Nations General Assembly yesterday, amongst other things:
In the words of the Oxford philosopher Toby Ord “we are just old enough to get ourselves into serious trouble”…
It is time for humanity to grow up.
It is time for us to listen to the warnings of the scientists – and look at Covid, if you want an example of gloomy scientists being proved right – and to understand who we are and what we are doing.
The world – this precious blue sphere with its eggshell crust and wisp of an atmosphere – is not some indestructible toy, some bouncy plastic romper room against which we can hurl ourselves to our heart’s content.
Daily, weekly, we are doing such irreversible damage that long before a million years are up, we will have made this beautiful planet effectively uninhabitable – not just for us but for many other species.
And that is why the Glasgow COP26 summit is the turning point for humanity.
If all that sounds unlikely, then take a look:
https://youtu.be/Z_YPE7vy_wQ?t=27
As we surmised at the time of the recent G7 Summit in Cornwall:
Arctic tours ship MS MALMO with 16 passengers on board got stuck in ice on Sep 3 off Longyearbyen, Svalbard Archipelago, halfway between Norway and North Pole. The ship is on Arctic tour with Climate Change documentary film team, and tourists, concerned with Climate Change and melting Arctic ice. All 16 Climate Change warriors were evacuated by helicopter in challenging conditions, all are safe. 7 crew remains on board, waiting for Coast Guard ship assistance.
Something is very wrong with Arctic ice, instead of melting as ordered by UN/IPCC, it captured the ship with Climate Change Warriors.
Not a lot of people know that despite all that purple prose Malmö has somehow managed to emerge unscathed from the clutches of the sea ice on the other side of Svalbard from Longyearbyen:
It will come as no surprise to our regular readers that the web site of our even older friend Anthony Watts has also published the self same story, also without the happy ending.
Whilst it is reasonable to assume that Paul and Anthony are not fluent in Norwegian, it seems they are also unfamiliar with Google. If they had performed the merest modicum of due diligence and employed the services of Google translate before pressing the “publish” button they would have discovered the coverage of the “massive false information” about the Malmö’s story in the Svalbard Post, published on September 5th:
Trygve Monsen and expedition leader Tore Toppe were among the 16 who were evacuated when MS Malmö got stuck in the ice on Tuesday. They respond strongly to what they call misinformation on the right-wing website document.no
Those who were on board MS Malmö have a completely different version of events.
“First, we are not Swedish. We are a group of middle aged Norwegians following the route of the Ahlmann expedition of 1931“, says Trygve Monsen. He himself has worked for the Norwegian press for a long time, particularly Aftenposten, where he has been both digital manager and correspondent in Berlin.
Together with Expedition Chief Tore Topp, Monsen arrived at the Svalbard Post on Thursday. He had tried to contact document.no many times before that, to correct the false information. They also say that they are not climate activists.
“No way. But when you are in the Arctic, and have been here many times over several years, you can’t help but notice what is happening to the environment up here”, says Topp. This is the seventh expedition he has led in the Arctic.
The evacuation of MS Malmö on Tuesday took place without significant drama. The boat was surprised by harsh ice conditions and eventually got stuck. The captain decided to ask for evacuation, for safety. The Governor came by helicopter and after a few minutes all the passengers were evacuated. The crew on the boat remained on board, and later got help from KV “Andenes” to get out of the sea ice.
In other old news the southern route through the Northwest Passage opened on August 15th this year, although with the assistance of the icebreaker CCGS Terry Fox the MS Bremen made it through a few days earlier:
[Edit – September 11th]
MS Malmö is now back in the range of an AIS receiver, whilst apparently en route back to Norway:
[Edit – September 12th]
I ventured onto Twitter this morning, where I discovered Matt Ridley regurgitating the same nonsense about MS Malmö, plus this news from the Norwegian Coastguard:
Kystvakten fikk melding om at MS Malmø trengte assistanse sør i Hinlopen-stredet. Da KV Andenes kom frem til området hadde MS Malmø klart å komme seg løs fra isen i åpen råk. Fartøyet ble eskortert ut av området og MS Malmø går nå for egen maskin tilbake til Longyearbyen. pic.twitter.com/ZFpa6fEmCN
Perhaps Paul, Anthony, Matt et al. would care to click @Jack’s helpfully provided “Translate Tweet” button?
I’ve also discovered that document.no eventually published a “correction” to their original story on September 9th. Perhaps Paul, Anthony, Matt et al. would care to follow suit?
Yet another greenie expedition to the Arctic to raise awareness of ‘global warming’ has been scuppered by unexpected large quantities of ice.
Furthermore James has brought my attention to the fact that my foolish numbering system is out of date. According to his reckoning MS Malmö is actually “Ship of Fools IV”. Mind you he’s also claiming that Northabout was “Ship of Fools II”, which is obviously another porkie pie of epic proportions.
James also repeats the “stuck in ice off Longyearbyen” nonsense. For Donald, James, Paul, Anthony, Matt et al. here’s the current view of all the sea ice off Longyearbyen, via Joss Stone on Twitter:
Wow, this place is stunning. Feel very lucky to be here. Cant wait to share our experiences with you. Now, where can I get a cup of tea? #arcticpic.twitter.com/JpjbS48Ebj
In actual fact there is of course currently less sea ice in the Arctic than in any previous year (in the satellite record) apart from 2012:
[Edit – September 13th]
Today on Twitter I’ve found myself in conversation about #MalmoGate with Ken. He doesn’t say an awful lot, but he appears to think that MS Malmö being “surprised by harsh ice conditions” is significant in some way:
What’s that supposed to prove Ken?
According to #WUWT “MS Malmo… got stuck in ice on Sep 3 off Longyearbyen”
The captain would have been very surprised to encounter such conditions, because that’s unadulterated ballcocks! #MalmoGate
One of the things that is actually significant about the 2019 melting season is quite the reverse of that. The Swedish icebreaker Oden spent a couple of weeks pootling around in the Sherard Osborn Fjord in North Greenland without getting “stuck in the vanishing Arctic ice”:
[Edit – September 14th]
What Ken, Paul Joseph, Donald, James, Paul, Anthony, Matt et al. evidently fail to comprehend is that the sea ice covering the Arctic Ocean doesn’t merely expand and contract with the seasons. It also moves. Just in case any of them do get around to doing a modicum of due diligence, take a good long look at this animation of Arctic sea ice age from the September 2015 minimum to the end of August this year:
[Edit – September 15th]
It has just come to my attention that our very old friend Tony Heller (the artist formally known as Steve Goddard) has somewhat belatedly jumped on the MalmoGate bandwagon:
Has drawn on official sources.. to uncover what is actually happening [in the Arctic]
Have we got news for you Christopher? That’s not how it works in the cryodenialosphere! Mr. Homewood’s article about Mr. Booker’s article about Mr. Homewood’s previous article(s) is littered with factual errors. This is what happens should you be foolish enough to attempt to correct such errors.
Here is what we typed into the comment section of Mr. Homewood’s blog:
Of course if Mr. Booker were to have considered Arctic sea ice volume he might have thought twice about his “there is even more of it today than in February 2006, and it is also significantly thicker.” remark?
David Rose is mercifully quiet this weekend, but there’s no rest for the wicked! Christopher Booker in the Sunday Telegraph leads a bunch of the usual Alt-facts suspects in a barrage of fake news about our dearly beloved Arctic sea ice. According to Mr. Booker in the “Arctic Myths” section of his column today:
As the fake science of global warming continues to crumble, one scare story the zealots are determined to hold on to at all costs is their claim that ice in the Arctic is dangerously vanishing. Yet again lately we have been treated to a barrage of such headlines as “Hottest Arctic on record triggers massive ice melt”.
The nearest we got to such a headline here at the Great White Con was “Arctic Sea Ice News from AGU” in which article we showed images which said things like:
That’s because last year was the *hottest year on record in the Arctic! Undeterred by mere facts Mr. Booker continues:
But that ever-diligent blogger Paul Homewood has drawn on official sources such as the US National Snow and Ice Data Center to uncover what is actually happening. Under “Arctic Fake News”, on NotALotOfPeopleKnowThat, he posted a graph showing that last week the extent of sea ice was much the same as it has been at this date ever since 2001. Indeed, according to the Danish Meteorological Institute, there is even more of it today than in February 2006, and it is also significantly thicker. Back in 2008 much of the ice was only a metre thick. Today that has risen to two metres, and in some places four.
Mr. Booker appears to be more than somewhat confused, since this is what the DMI Arctic sea ice extent graph he links to reveals:
In addition the DMI thickness maps he refers to aren’t available at any of the places he mentions! Not a lot of people know that he was probably thinking of another recent article by Paul Homewood entitled “Arctic Ice Fake News“, which includes these two DMI thickness maps:
Even without considering other sources of Arctic thickness and/or volume data it is quite clear from the two volume graphs that according to the Danish Meteorological Institue Arctic sea ice volume is significantly lower this year than it was in 2008. If Arctic sea ice extent is greater this year and the volume is lower then the laws of physics (which not even the combined talents of Messrs Homewood and Booker can change) dictate that its average thickness must be LESS this year than in 2008!
Mr Booker blunders on:
The DMI data also show that the Greenland ice sheet, which we are told is melting at horrendous speed, is actually growing this year at a record rate, to a size way above its average for the past 26 years. And the most authoritative record of Northern Hemisphere snow cover shows this year’s ranking as one of the six highest since 1967.
He seems blissfully unaware that the “DMI data” to which he refers is the output of a DMI climate model that attempts to determine the “surface mass balance” of the Greenland ice sheet. He seems to think it’s a measurement of the mass of the Greenland ice sheet, which it isn’t. However this is, courtesy of NASA:
In his bubble of astounding Arctic ignorance Mr. Booker continues:
The Deplorable Climate Science blog, run by US expert Tony Heller, gleefully reproduces a 2007 headline: “Scientists: ‘Arctic is screaming’, global warming may have passed tipping point”. As Heller comments: “The Arctic is indeed screaming at climate scientists – to shut up.”
Now as luck would have it I have been (vainly!) attempting to persuade Mr. Heller “to shut up” on the very article Mr. Booker references! Let’s take a quick look at a couple of highlights shall we?
It seems safe to assume that Mr. Booker wasn’t reading Mr Heller’s blog on or after February 22nd does it not? Otherwise he would surely have had second thoughts about writing such a ludicrous phrase as “there is even more of it today than in February 2006”?
Then of course there’s the burning question of the “Hottest Arctic on record”
You seem to have forgotten about spring Gail? Here’s April:
Here’s the May graph from “the most authoritative record of Northern Hemisphere snow cover” for good measure:
To summarise, Messrs Booker and Homewood could have confined their due diligence on their assorted Arctic articles to reading my comments on Mr. Heller’s blog. Having done so it would quickly have become apparent to them that every single point they made was in actual fact a “fake fact”.
The inevitable conclusion is that they have no interest whatsoever in establishing the actual facts about the Arctic. All they are interested in is propagating “fake news” about the Arctic as far and as wide as possible in pursuit of a common “agenda”. As is David Rose.
Our title for today does of course refer to the inconvenient hiatus caused by the Gremlins currently stealing my comments from under the noses of Anthony Watts’ eagle eyed team of moderators before they can approve them as suitable for public view. Yesterday Mr. Watts published an article under the headline:
Since hitting its earliest minimum extent since 1997, Arctic sea ice has been expanding at a phenomenal rate. Already it is greater than at the same date in 2007, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2015. Put another way, it is the fourth highest extent in the last ten years. Even more remarkably, ice growth since the start of the month is actually the greatest on record, since daily figures started to be kept in 1987.
As I wrote when looking at last year’s data the declining Arctic ice cover has been one of the most powerful images of climate change and that many who follow the debate don’t look too hard at the data. This results in superficial reporting that does not convey any of the complexities of the situation and as such is poor science communication.
With the data for 2016 now in it is time to look again at the claims of an “ice pause.”
In the spirit of improving science communication I commented as follows on Mr. Watts article, when seven previous comments were visible:
Annual average sea ice was all the rage last year:
You may well be wondering what a graph of annual average Arctic sea ice extent looks like? Take a look:
Discuss.
This morning (UTC) there are 197 comments visible under the WUWT article, but mine is not amongst them. Those Gremlins have a lot to answer for!
You may possibly think my comment was somewhat on the terse side? In part that’s because I’d just had a “debate” of sorts with one or more WUWT moderators who happily admitted to [snip]ping large parts of my side of the “conversation”. I certainly didn’t want to offend them by “taking pot shots” or engaging in “self promotion”. After all they had concluded their remarks by informing me that:
It is settled then …you are mendacious
The SIMPLEST solution is to stop attempting to post comments here. We are not required to carry them.
Needless to say my most recent witty riposte was grabbed by the Gremlins:
Just in case you were wondering what a mendacious moderator might mean:
[men-dey-shuh s]
adjective
1. telling lies, especially habitually; dishonest; lying; untruthful:
a mendacious person.
Halloween is a little way away still, but nonetheless I have a horror story to tell you. Are you sitting comfortably?
As our regular reader(s) will be aware we have been following the fortunes of the plucky little yacht Northabout on her Arctic circumnavigation with great interest. That includes the series of reports about the voyage on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. Even recent passers by may have noticed that we were none too pleased with the most recent episode in the series!
Now comes news that one of the numerous usual suspects has been blathering about both the Polar Ocean Challenge expedition and that BBC Radio 4 programme. Enter stage right James Delingpole at Breitbart. Under the catchy but erroneous headline:
The Polar Ocean Challenge expedition – aka Ship of Fools II – has escaped from the Arctic by the skin of its teeth. It was supposed to show how amazingly navigable the Arctic Circle has become now that climate change is supposedly melting the polar ice caps at a dangerous and unprecedented rate. But according to one observer who has followed their progress closely (see comments at Paul Homewood‘s place), the intrepid explorers – including a 14-year-old boy – came within just two days of calamity, after being hampered by unexpectedly large quantities of a mysterious substance apparently made of frozen water.
Regular readers will recall that not a lot of people know that Paul Homewood is the proprietor of a production line of porky pies full of horrifying Arctic anomalies. Mr. Delingpole references one batch of such Halloween howlers, wittily entitled:
The southern NWP route is now closed at the NE exit, with northern Prince Regent Sound blocked by 9/10 ice in freeze up mode. Exactly where they barely made it through after hours of probing on 9/12. Northabout made it through NWP with just two days to spare. Had they taken the planned 2 days resupplying in Barrow rather than 1, and the planned one day call at Cambridge Bay (meeting up with Polar Bound), they would not have made it out and would have had to turn around and overwinter at Cambridge Bay. It was that close.
Now how can I put this politely? That is pure unadulterated balderdash. If Mr. Delingpole thinks that a comment on a known “snow blind” blog constitutes evidence of anything he needs one of his heads examined. Deconstructing all the mistakes in just this one article about both Northabout and the BBC’s climate change coverage will involve a series with more episodes than BBC Radio 4s! However we have to start somewhere, so let’s examine this assertion first shall we?
Paul Homewood notes… it’s also the earliest minimum since 1997, indicating that the Arctic is currently experiencing a very cold spell.
Some skeptical fellows over on Twitter disagreed with me about the facts of the matter. This is how that “debate” proceeded:
In other news Anthony Watts has today published a guest post about Arctic sea ice by one Caleb Shaw on his Watts Up With That blog. I thought I’d pose Paul and Caleb some relevant questions, but a team of Gremlins seem to have been hard at work stealing my pertinent comments before the assorted [mods] could approve them. By way of example, from Breitbart:
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