Facts About the Arctic in June 2021

Let’s begin the month with a “true colour” image from the Terra satellite of the Laptev Sea and thereabouts:

The blueish tinge indicates the appearance of melt ponds almost everywhere over the land-fast ice currently covering the majority of the Laptev Sea.

Let’s also take a look at the high resolution AMSR2 metrics for the end of May 2021:

Thanks to the recent “brief hiatus” in areal decline, Arctic wide compaction is no longer in record territory:

Finally, for the moment at least, here is the Danish Meteorological Institute’s high Arctic temperature data in the form of a graph of freezing degree days:

For some reason the data file still doesn’t include data to the end of May, but things won’t change much by then. Over the winter as a whole only 2016/17 was significantly warmer.

Let the 2021 Arctic sea ice summer melting season officially begin!

[Edit – June 4th]

Perhaps unsurprisingly the GFS forecast from four days ago hasn’t quite worked out as predicted. The Arctic as a whole is certainly on the warm side, with a +2 C anomaly at this moment:

However the 966 hPa MSLP cyclone predicted for Monday is now forecast to be a mere 978 hPa:

With 3 days to go there is a reasonable chance of it verifying in the “New Arctic” of 2021. As you can see from the map above a large area of the Central Arctic has now lost its snow cover. This is confirmed by the Rutgers Snow Lab northern hemisphere data for May:

A new Sentinel 3 melt pond fraction product from the University of Bremen confirms that on the fast ice in the Laptev & East Siberian Seas snow cover has departed and melt ponds have arrived:

In other news Wipneus has released the latest PIOMAS gridded thickness and volume data on the Arctic Sea Ice Forum:

For some strange reason 2021 volume at the end of May is almost identical to 2012 and 2020! Plus of course there’s the modelled volume export from the Central Arctic via the Fram Strait:

[Edit – June 6th]

This “false colour” image reveals that there’s virtually no snow cover left on land, and this “false colour” image reveals that the land-fast ice in the East Siberian Sea is now awash with melt ponds:

[Edit – June 8th]

The forecast low pressure area appears to have bottomed out near the Severnaya Zemlya islands with a 978 hPa MSLP:

High resolution AMSR2 Arctic sea ice area is now 2nd lowest for the date after 2016:

Laptev sea ice area is still lowest for the data, and looks as though it will retain that position for a while:

[Edit – June 9th]

The effect of the recent heat and wind on the remaining sea ice in the Laptev Sea is now all too apparent:

It’s also evident in the DMI >80N temperature graph, which has now reached sea ice “melting point” ahead of the climatology:

Note that the blue line is actually above the “freezing point” of salty Arctic sea water.

[Edit – June 13th]

Fairly clear skies over the Laptev Sea and the western East Siberian Sea, revealing wall to wall melt ponds and the land-fast ice starting to break up near the coast as well as on the edge of the now open ocean:

Plus yesterday’s view of the Beaufort Sea, revealing fast ice breaking up in the western entrance to the McClure Strait:

[Edit – June 18th]

A clearish view of the Laptev Sea today, revealing assorted cracks in a variety of locations:

[Edit – June 20th]

The latest mid-month PIOMAS thickness/volume numbers have been released:

[Edit – June 23rd]

The skies over the Vilkitsky Strait have been cloudy for a few days. However a fairly clear view yesterday reveals that breakup is well under way in what is usually one the last areas along the Northern Sea Route to become navigable:

[Edit – June 26th]

The land-fast ice in the East Siberian Sea has started to disintegrate en masse:

Data from ice mass balance buoy 441910, currently located at 76.1 N, 151.1 W in the Beaufort Sea, reveals the onset of both surface and bottom melt:

Watch this space!

Unsettling Koonin Critiques Continue

We have previously mentioned assorted reviews of Steven Koonin‘s new book “Unsettled”, but today we bring news of a novel variation on that theme. In an article on the Union of Concerned Scientists web site Ben Santer writes:

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has invited Professor Steven Koonin to give a seminar on May 27, 2021. Professor Koonin’s seminar will cover material contained in a book he published on May 4. His book is entitled “Unsettled”. Its basic thesis is that climate science is not trustworthy.

Professor Koonin is not a climate scientist. I am. I have worked at LLNL since 1992. My primary job is to evaluate computer models of the climate system. I also seek to improve understanding of human and natural influences on climate.

Please read Ben’s article in full, but I expect you can already see what’s coming?

Continue reading Unsettling Koonin Critiques Continue

Unsettling Defence of the Undefensible?

As mentioned in a previous episode of my series of reviews of Steven Koonin’s new book “Unsettled”, he published an allegedly “detailed point-by-point rebuttal of the fact check” of his book by Climate Feedback on Medium.

I politely enquired in a comment on Medium “Why does ‘Unsettled’ fail to address the issue of declining Arctic sea ice?”, and Steven was gracious enough to reply that:

All writers have to make choices. I didn’t (couldn’t) write an assessment report…

My focus is on significant points where the popular perception about climate and energy is very different from what the science says. In that way, this book is about more than what’s scientifically correct and what isn’t; it’s also about how the science, with all of its certainties and uncertainties, becomes The Science — how it gets summarized and communicated, and what’s lost in the process…

So limited space (and time writing the book) meant arctic sea ice didn’t get much mention. The topic is also somewhat distant from ordinary folks’ perception (unlike storms, heat waves, SLR, …).

Even so, on page 85 you can find a discussion of the ice-albedo feedback, although I don’t use that term. (no need to introduce technical lingo when it’s not convenient)

However Steven then rather ungraciously chose to ignore my follow up question:

Regarding “the topic somewhat distant from ordinary folks’ perception”, that is largely my point. Is Arctic sea ice decline really any more distant to the average (wo)man in the street than sea level rise?

Etc. etc. For 8 days and counting…

via GIPHY

Since Steve is evidently unable and/or unwilling to respond to my enquiry perhaps somebody else might be willing to do so in the space provided for that purpose below?

Meanwhile here’s news of a brand new paper documenting the evidently inexorable decline of the sea ice cover across the Arctic Ocean:

https://GreatWhiteCon.info/2021/05/month-in-review-arctic-science-edition/#Ricker

Steve Koonin’s Unsettled History of US Temperature

Regular readers will no doubt have noticed by now that here at the Great White Con we are publishing a series of reviews of Steven E. Koonin‘s new book “Unsettled”? Today we move on to the topic of Land-Surface Air Temperature (LSAT for short). Here is an extract from the very first page of the book:

Yes, it’s true that the globe is warming, and that humans are exerting a warming influence upon it. But beyond that—to paraphrase the classic movie The Princess Bride: “I do not think ‘The Science’ says what you think it says.”

For example, both the research literature and government reports that summarize and assess the state of climate science say clearly that heat waves in the US are now no more common than they were in 1900, and that the warmest temperatures in the US have not risen in the past fifty years. When I tell people this, most are incredulous. Some gasp. And some get downright hostile.

Here once again is an extract from page 23 of the Kindle edition of Steve’s book:

The [IPCC] assessment reports literally define The Science for non-experts. Given the intensive authoring and review processes, any reader would naturally expect that their assessments and summaries of the research literature are complete, objective, and transparent—the “gold standard.” In my experience, the reports largely do meet that expectation, and so much of the detail in the first part of this book, the science story, is drawn from them.

First of all let me remind Steve that the United States does not constitute the entirety of our planet. In particular the Arctic is warming a lot faster than mid latitudes in general and the US in particular. Using WRIT once again to produce our own time series, we can compare and contrast longer term temperature records between the Continental United States and the Arctic (including both land and ocean above the Arctic circle):

Also note that for some reason Steve makes no mention of US “coolest temperatures” and/or “cold waves” since 1900. I don’t know about you, but the top graph certainly suggest to me that “the warmest temperatures in the US have risen in the past fifty years”.

Let’s see how Steve explains himself. For that we have to wait until Chapter 5, catchily entitled “Hyping the Heat”. Therein no mention is made of recent temperature increases across the Arctic, but we are able to read in the introductory paragraphs that:

We can all agree the globe has gotten warmer over the past several decades. Here’s another summary statement from the IPCC’s AR5:

[S]ince about 1950 it is very likely that the numbers of cold days and nights have decreased and the numbers of warm days and nights have increased . . . there is medium confidence that globally the length and frequency of warm spells, including heat waves, has increased since the middle of the 20th century. (IPCC. AR5 WGI Section 2.6.1.)

Then there is a long discussion about what Steve apparently perceives to be shortcomings in the “The US government’s most recent assessment report, the 2017 Climate Science Special Report (CSSR)”. Steve is apparently well qualified in physics, so presumably he is able to comprehend these equations?

  • US ≠ Global
  • CSSR AR5

For those of you less familiar with the arcane language of mathematics and physics that translates to “the climate of the continental United States is not identical to Arctic climate or typical of the climate of Planet Earth as a whole” and hence “US Governmental climate reports are not necessarily typical of ‘Intergovernmental’ climate assessments”.

Next let’s check what Steve’s “gold standard for The Science” has to say on this topic. According to section 2.6.1 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fifth Assessment Report, as cited by Steve:

A large amount of evidence continues to support the conclusion that most global land areas analysed have experienced significant warming of both maximum and minimum temperature extremes since about 1950 (Donat et al., 2013c). Changes in the occurrence of cold and warm days (based on daily maximum temperatures) are generally less marked (Figure 2.32):

Figure 2.32 | Trends in annual frequency of extreme temperatures over the period 1951–2010, for (a) cold nights (TN10p), (b) cold days (TX10p), (c) warm nights (TN90p) and (d)
warm days (TX90p) (Box 2.4, Table 1). Trends were calculated only for grid boxes that had at least 40 years of data during this period and where data ended no earlier than 2003.
Grey areas indicate incomplete or missing data. Black plus signs (+) indicate grid boxes where trends are significant (i.e., a trend of zero lies outside the 90% confidence interval).
The data source for trend maps is HadEX2 (Donat et al., 2013c) updated to include the latest version of the European Climate Assessment data set (Klok and Tank, 2009). Beside
each map are the near-global time series of annual anomalies of these indices with respect to 1961–1990 for three global indices data sets: HadEX2 (red); HadGHCND (Caesar et al., 2006; blue) and updated to 2010 and GHCNDEX (Donat et al., 2013a; green). Global averages are only calculated using grid boxes where all three data sets have at least 90%
of data over the time period. Trends are significant (i.e., a trend of zero lies outside the 90% confidence interval) for all the global indices shown.

To paraphrase The Princess Bride once again: “I do not think ‘The Science’ says what Steven E. Koonin says it says in ‘Unsettled’”.

Unsettling, is it not?

The Northwest Passage in 2021

Prompted by a comment on the Northwest Passage thread from last year I’m opening the 2021 equivalent earlier than usual, in part because there’s already a lot going on of interest. First of all let’s get our bearings with the help of this map of the area:

and another map detailing the routes through Canadian Arctic Archipelago that have previously been successfully traversed:

The forecast high pressure has arrived and the skies have cleared over the Beaufort Sea, which reveals that the land-fast ice off the Mackenzie Delta has started breaking up:

In addition the snow has been melting along the valley of the Mackenzie River, and the resulting increased flow at the mouth of the delta is flooding the fast ice:

Continue reading The Northwest Passage in 2021

Steven Koonin’s Unsettled Greenland Ice Sheet Science

For our latest review of Steven E. Koonin’s new book, “Unsettled”, we’re moving from the ice covering the Arctic seas on to land. Greenland to be specific. Unlike Arctic sea ice the Greenland Ice Sheet does merit a mention in the book. In fact it’s one of the bullet points Steve leads with on page 2:

Here are three more [climate facts] that might surprise you, drawn directly from recent published research or the latest assessments of climate science published by the US government and the UN:

  • Humans have had no detectable impact on hurricanes over the past century.
  • ​Greenland’s ice sheet isn’t shrinking any more rapidly today than it was eighty years ago.
  • The net economic impact of human-induced climate change will be minimal through at least the end of this century.

So what gives?

A very good question Steve, because if we stick with the Arctic land ice referred to in the middle bullet, Professor Koonin makes no reference at this juncture to any “recent published research or latest assessment of climate science” to justify his assertion.

Which is a bit of a shame since in the Climate Feedback critique of Professor Koonin’s statement which was mentioned in our introductory article, Twila Moon from the United States’ National Snow and Ice Data Center points out that:

This statement is untrue. In fact, the Greenland Ice Sheet lost more mass during 2003-2010 than during all of 1900-2003 combined. This is evident in the following figure from Kjeldsen et al. (2015)

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Greenland-Kjeldsen-2015-1024x713.png
Surface elevation change rates in Greenland during 1900-1983 (a), 1983-2003 (b), and 2003-2010 (c). The numbers listed below each panel are the integrated Greenland-wide mass balance estimates expressed as gigatonnes per year and as millimetre per year GMSL (global mean sea level) equivalents.

If we look in more detail at changes over 1972-2018, we can further see that the ice sheet was mostly in balance (gain about the same amount of snow/ice in winter as is lost in summer) during the 1970s and 1980s [Mouginot and Rignot et al. (2019)]. It was only in the mid-1990s that Greenland ice loss began to increase more substantially.

Over the last 20 years, ice loss has been rapid and large, creating measurable sea level rise, which we experience as increases in coastal erosion, flooding, problems with water and sewer systems at the coasts, and saltwater inundation of freshwater sources.

So how is it possible for Steve Koonin to have got his facts so wrong? For his attempt at justification we have to wait until chapter 8 of “Unsettled” on the subject of “Sea Level Scares”. On page 160 of my Kindle edition Steve writes:

So future global sea level rise is uncertain not only because of all of the model uncertainties in the global temperature rise discussed in Chapter 4, but also because the dynamics of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are quite uncertain. The IPCC summarizes the situation (SMB is the Surface Mass Balance, measuring the net change in ice due to atmospheric processes): . . .

“For periods prior to 1970, significant discrepancies between climate models and observations arise from the inability of climate models to reproduce some observed regional changes in glacier and GIS [Greenland Ice Sheet] SMB around the southern tip of Greenland. It is not clear whether this bias in climate models is due to the internal variability of the climate system or deficiencies in climate models. For this reason, there is still medium confidence in the ability of climate models to simulate past and future changes in glaciers mass loss and Greenland SMB.”

The reference for this quotation is given as “IPCC SROCC Section 4.2.2.2.6“, which on inspection is entitled “Budget of global mean sea level change”. The immediate question that springs to my mind is “Why didn’t Steve refer to SROCC Section 1.4.2?”. That section is entitled “Observed and Projected Changes in the Cryosphere”, and skipping over the Arctic sea ice section for the moment it states:

AR5 assessed that the annual mean loss from the Greenland ice sheet very likely substantially increased from 34 (-6–74) Gt yr–1 (billion tonnes yr–1) over the period 1992–2001, to 215 (157–274) Gt yr–1 over the period 2002–2011.

Or Steve might have quoted from Section 4.2.2.2.4 “Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets”, but for some reason he didn’t:

Frequent observations of ice sheet mass changes have only been available since the advent of space observations (see Section 3.3.1). In the pre-satellite era, mass balance was geodetically reconstructed only for the GIS (Kjeldsen et al., 2015)

op. cit., or as suggested there he could even have quoted from Section 3.3.1 “Ice Sheet Changes”, but once again he didn’t:

The GIS was close to balance in the early years of the 1990s (Hanna et al., 2013; Khan et al., 2015), the interior above 2000 m altitude gained mass from 1961 to 1990 (Colgan et al., 2015) and both coastal and ice sheet sites experienced an increasing precipitation trend from 1890 to 2012 and 1890 to 2000 respectively (Mernild et al., 2015), but since the early 1990s multiple observations and modelling studies show strong warming and an increase in runoff (very high confidence).

Personally I have very high confidence that Professor Koonin had great difficulty cherry picking a Greenland Ice Sheet quote from the IPCC that could be “spun” into supporting his case. Frankly his “southern tip of Greenland” effort smacks of desperation.

Unsettling, is it not?

[Edit – June 12th]

Here’s a long thread on Twitter from Helen Fricker, explaining the genesis of the IPCC’s Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate. Essential reading for Steve Koonin, since he is apparently unaware of any of this!

Helen refers to her recent op-ed for The Hill which goes into slightly more detail:

The upcoming sixth IPCC report in 2022 will contain updated projections of future sea level rise based on tens of different simulations provided by research groups around the world. These groups all worked together in a community-led effort, involving ice sheet, ocean and atmosphere modeling and observational teams.

We have come a long way, but even after all this we are still playing “catch-up,” and there are still gaps in our understanding. We do know, however, that the ocean is warming and that both Antarctica and Greenland are vulnerable to this warming. The same goes for the atmosphere. We worry that the biggest portion of Antarctica, East Antarctica — which we still think of as a sleepy giant since it is so thick and vast, making it harder for warming ocean waters and increasing air temperatures to reach it — is starting to show signs of change. We also worry that there may be mechanisms, that we have not been able to witness in the modern record and hence that are not in the models, that may amplify the ice loss. Scientists are using paleo-reconstructions to figure out whether these may be important.

Still, we can say with confidence that sea level will continue to rise (faster) in the future and that our projections are conservative estimates. Indeed, satellite observations that measure the changing height (altimetry) and changing mass (gravimetry) of ice sheets are tracking the worst-case predictions from IPCC’s fifth report.

As we gather more data, both on and around the ice sheets using all available tools, including satellites, our observational record gets longer and our understanding improves. As our understanding improves, our models get better. Long-term measurements, sometimes acquired by launching new satellites (such as NASA’s ICESat-2 and other follow-on missions), coordinated modeling and international collaboration are key to delivering more accurate predictions, so that coastal communities can make informed decisions to protect infrastructure and citizens and manage resources.

ICESat-2 Gridded Sea Ice Thickness

It’s been a long wait since NASA launched the ICESat-2 satellite in September 2018:

However some good news has arrived at long last! ICESat-2 level 4 monthly gridded Arctic sea ice thickness data is now available for download via the NSIDC:

https://nsidc.org/data/IS2SITMOGR4

Now for the bad news. Currently it’s only available from 1 November 2018 to 30 April 2020 . There also seems to be an absence of data in summer, just like CryoSat-2.

Here is my first visualisation of the most recent data, for April 2020:

Here is the equivalent from AWI’s CryoSat-2/SMOS gridded thickness product for comparison purposes:

Koonin’s Unsettled Science – The Movie(s)

We have previously mentioned the Wall Street Journal’s assorted activities promoting the new book by Steven E. Koonin which possesses the rather long winded title of “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.”

We further speculated that assorted things that climate science tells us which Dr. Koonin neglected to mention in his book would also not appear in moving pictures expounding his “message”. That has indeed proved to be the case. You can see a copy of the book in question handily placed on a bookshelf behind Steve Koonin in this interview with Paul Gigot for the Wall Street Journal:

By way of introduction Paul enquires:

What isn’t settled in your mind?

Steve responds:

What isn’t settled is how the climate is going to respond to growing human influences, and how that response will affect society and ecosystems.

A little later Paul asserts that:

There’s no question that fossil fuel extraction and burning adds carbon dioxide and methane and other things into the atmosphere. Is the issue just how the interactions work and how much warming they will cause? I mean Al Gore keeps telling us for example that if you look at the graph of CO2 emissions it’s going up, therefore there’s a direct correlation between that and temperature. I think you’re saying “that’s not true”?

to which Steve responds:

That’s not true! For example, when you look at the record global temperature went down between 1940 and 1970 even as greenhouse gases increased. That’s got to tell you immediately that things are a little more complicated than just greenhouse gases are warming the Earth.

So there you have it. Al Gore is a mere straw man, easily knocked down with a cherry pick without even bothering to mention any of the underlying science.

Paul moves on to mention in passing our favourite topic here at the Great White Con:

Now what about the idea that if we continue to warm you’re seeing all these consequence in terms of much more severe weather events, you’re seeing rising oceans, you’re seeing the melting of the polar ice caps. All of that sort of blends together into a kind of disastrous scenario. Are you saying that those are also just simply exaggerated?

Steve responds eagerly:

Yes they are! And let me give you some factoids.

Unsettlingly none of the factoids he gives us mention Arctic sea ice, a topic which Professor Koonin appears to be strangely ignorant of. Perhaps that’s because whichever way you try to slice and dice it that’s still the ultimately unavoidable giant canary in the climate coal mine?

[Edit – May 11th]

Needless to say Steve Koonin has also been interviewed by Tucker Carlson for Fox News. Needless to say the clip once again opens with a speech by that well known climate scientist, Joe Biden. Needless to say there is no mention of the giant canary in the Arctic coal mine once again. Tucker makes no reference to Greenland either, which does at least merit a mention in Steve’s book. Take a look:

Tucker opens his questioning with:

A hurricane will arise out of the Caribbean. We’ll have a heat wave. We’ll have a cold snap. All of them are attributed reflexively to climate change. How certain can we be that climate change causes those events?

Steve responds:

When you read the official reports from the UN and the US Government you find some surprises. For example, even though the globe has warmed by about 2 degrees Fahrenheit over the last century the incidence of heat waves across the 48 states is no greater than it was in 1900, and the highest temperatures haven’t gone up in 60 years.

We have been able to find no detectable influence on hurricanes from humans, and the models that we use to predict future climates have become more uncertain even as they’ve become more sophisticated. All of these things suggest that people who say that “we’ve broken the climate” and face certain doom unless we take drastic action are just misinformed about what the official reports actually say.

Despite the fact that Fox display some stock footage of sea ice during the interview, Tucker and Steve seem strangely unaware that those 48 states do not constitute the entire globe, or that there was a 2.7 degrees Celsius “heat wave” in the Arctic even as the interview was being conducted:

A little later in the interview Steve says:

We need to have an accurate portrayal of what we know and what we don’t know, and then we can have the debate about what to do about it, without using science as a weapon.

Sadly Steve seems strangely unaware that evidently you’re not going to get the accurate portrayal he recommends via Fox News!

[Edit – May 14th]

Steven Koonin has also been interviewed on CNBC’s Squawk Box, where Joe Kernen’s introduction gives you a strong flavour of what’s to come:

Corporations are spending billions to reduce their so called carbon footprint. President Biden’s infrastructure plan is loaded with subsidies for green industries. In fact if the new green deal ever was passed it wouldn’t be billions, it would be trillions.

Our next guest questions the conventional wisdom on climate science and it’s impact on business and the US economy. Steven Koonin served as the chief scientist in the Obama energy department, and is currently a professor at NYU and the author of “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters” :

Steve begins by assuring Joe’s audience that:

Everything I’ve written in this book comes almost directly from the official UN and US Government assessment reports, so this is not Steve talking really, but it is the consensus science.

For some strange reason Steve neglected to include the phrase “ignored and/or cherry picked” in front of “official UN and US Government assessment reports”. He then spouts his by now familiar schtick about “heatwaves in the US”, “hurricanes” and “global wildfires”. Joe then moves the conversation on to the economy:

Will there be an unnecessary negative effect on GDP, on corporations, if they pursue this when it’s not really necessary?

To which Dr. Koonin, as Joe calls him, responds:

I like to say you change the energy system by orthodonture rather than tooth extraction. And so if we do want to reduce carbon emissions we need to do it at a more thoughtful pace and in a more thoughtful way than is being proposed, and moreover we need to get the rest of the world to come along with us if it’s going to have any impact at all…

As [John] Kerry has said, unless the rest of the world comes along US efforts are futile.

So yet again no mention of the IPCC’s “consensus science” regarding Arctic sea ice or even the Greenland Ice Sheet. I cannot help but wonder where Steve’s talking head will appear next on United States’ viewers screens, but on past performance it seems unlikely that the cryosphere will merit a mention.

Watch this space!

Steve Koonin’s Unsettled Arctic Science

Regular readers of this blog will no doubt have realised that way up here in the Great White Con Ivory Towers we concluded many moons ago that Arctic sea ice is the “canary in the climate coal mine”.

Unlike some others we have already mentioned we were not the beneficiaries of a review copy of Steven E. Koonin’s new book, catchily entitled “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters”. Hence I was compelled to acquire my own review copy, and have just purchased the electronic version. I eagerly searched the virtual weighty tome for the term “Arctic sea ice”, and you may well be wondering what I discovered?

Nothing. Nada. Zilch. ничего такого. Nic.

I broadened my thus far vain search by removing the “Arctic” specifier, which revealed:

No mention of “sea ice” in the body of the book, merely a reference to the data underlying this graph of northern hemisphere snow cover:

I am forced to an unsettling conclusion. Evidently there are some areas of climate science that Dr. Koonin tells his eager readers nothing whatsoever about. It seems likely that he is also well aware that Arctic sea ice is the canary in the climate coal mine, which is why he has chosen to make no mention of it in his magnum opus.

Here is an informative video which will no doubt not appear in “Unsettled – The Movie”:

[Edit – May 8th]

Having now had time to read some of Steve Koonin’s “Unsettled Climate Science” at greater length I have discovered that it does contain one reference to Arctic sea ice, albeit using non-standard terminology. On page 40 of the Kindle version of the book I read:

Rising temperatures at the surface and in the ocean are not the only indicators of recent warming. The ice on the Arctic Ocean and in mountain glaciers has been in decline, and growing seasons have been lengthening slightly. Satellite observations show that the lower atmosphere is warming as well.

A paragraph I can broadly agree with, but I am compelled to ask why Dr. Koonin does not quantify the “decline of the ice on the Arctic Ocean” anywhere in the book? There are a wide variety of metrics used to quantify the “amount” of sea ice in the Arctic, but here is one readily available for download from the NASA web site. It is hard to believe that a scientist of Dr. Koonin’s experience, particularly one writing about climate change, has never previously come across a similar graph of Arctic sea ice extent:

Arctic sea ice reaches its minimum each September. September Arctic sea ice is now declining at a rate of 13.1 percent per decade, relative to the 1981 to 2010 average. This graph shows the average monthly Arctic sea ice extent each September since 1979, derived from satellite observations.

It seems safe to assume that Dr. Koonin has heard of NASA, since the organisation is mentioned several times in his list of references and once in the body of the book. However it seems that the United States’ National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC for short) is not very visible on his personal radar screen, meriting only a single reference which is to snow rather than ice data.

Here is the NSIDC’s version of the NASA graph above, which includes a handy trend line:

Monthly September ice extent for 1979 to 2020 shows a decline of 13.1 percent per decade.

Nearby Steve has penned another paragraph I can broadly agree with. On page 36 he states:

The warming of the past forty years on large scales hasn’t been uniform over the globe. That’s evident in Figure 1.5, reproduced from the US government’s 2017 CSSR (Climate Science Special Report, described earlier). As you can see, the land is warming more rapidly than the ocean surface, and the high latitudes near the poles are warming faster than the lower latitudes near the equator.

Here is the figure 1.5 referred to above:

Surface temperature change (in °F) for the period 1986–2015 relative to 1901–1960. Changes are generally significant over most land and ocean areas. Changes are not significant in parts of the North Atlantic Ocean, the South Pacific Ocean, and the southeastern United States. There is insufficient data in the Arctic Ocean and Antarctica to compute long-term changes there.

Once again I am compelled to ask some questions. Why not include a map that uses more recent data than 2015? And why not quantify how much faster the “high latitudes near the poles are warming than the lower latitudes near the equator”?

NASA helpfully provide an interface to their data which allows anybody who can click a mouse to produce their own global surface temperature maps. Here is the up to date answer to the first question:

NASA have also produced another informative video, which I suspect will also never make it into “Unsettled – The Movie”:

Another US scientific agency that provides publicly accessible climate data is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA for short). The abbreviation is referred to several times in Steve Koonin’s book, but for some reason he never expands the acronym in full. Like NASA they also provide a means to produce your own maps and time series. Albeit with a somewhat more complex user interface, the Web-based Reanalysis Intercomparison Tool (WRIT for short) allows the user to differentiate between different regions of Planet Earth, and hence answer the second question above.

Please compare and contrast the “non polar” temperature time series with the “Arctic” one. Note the change of scale of the X axis, and also the units. Degrees Kelvin rather than degrees Fahrenheit which are seemingly preferred by Dr. Koonin:

To summarise, you don’t need to wait for Steve Koonin to write another book or for the US government to produce another CSSR. Vast amounts of data and a plethora of visualisation tools are freely available to allow you to do your own research regarding a wide variety of climate metrics. Steve neglects to impart that information to his readers as well.

[Edit – May 9th]

As has been alluded to above, in the soon to be shipped hardcover edition of his new book Steve Koonin makes much mention of “snow cover” whilst ignoring “sea ice” entirely. There are also a grand total of 48 reference to the perhaps overly esoteric term “albedo“. On page 84 of the Kindle edition of “Unsettled” we are reliably informed that:

Among the most important things that a model has to get right are “feedbacks.”

Despite that the entire electronic volume makes no mention whatsoever of the phrase “ice-albedo feedback” or any synonym thereof. A brief course teaching the topic has recently been developed as part of the outreach activities of the MOSAiC Arctic drift expedition. Perhaps Dr. Koonin would be well advised to read it at his earliest convenience?

The ice-albedo feedback is an example of a positive feedback loop. A feedback loop is a cycle within a system that increases (positive) or decreases (negative) the effects on that system. In the Arctic, melting sea ice exposes more dark ocean (lower albedo), which in turn absorbs more heat and causes more ice to melt…the cycle continues.

Here’s another explanatory video which will also no doubt never make it into “Unsettled – The Movie”:

Watch this space for further revelations about the gigantic Arctic canary in the room!

Watts Up With Polariced Mysteries?

It’s not very often that we discuss an article from Watts Up With That with even the vaguest hint of approval in the smoke filled editorial offices at the Great White Con, but here’s the exception that proves the rule! No doubt the fact that allegedly I inspired the article in question is also relevant? Here’s the start of a guest post at WUWT entitled “Polariced Mysteries“, written by our old friend Willis Eschenbach:

I got into a discussion about polar sea ice in the comments to my post Where Is The Climate Emergency?. In the process I noticed some mysteries.

To start with, here’s the Arctic sea ice area record.

The mystery for me in this record is the decade from about 1998 to 2008. There’s very little month-to-month variation in the record over that period, and the ice area is dropping steadily … followed by ~ thirteen years of very large month-to-month variations with little overall change in ice area. Is this real? Is it an artifact? Unknown.

Then we have the Antarctic ice area record …

Here, the obvious mystery is, just what the heck happened around 2015-2017 to cause the Antarctic ice area to drop so precipitously?

And finally, putting both poles together, we get the following:

etc. etc…

At the North Pole, there is an ocean covered with sea ice. At the South Pole, there’s a high rocky plateau covered with land ice and surrounded by sea ice. Yet despite these totally different situations, the area of sea ice is almost exactly the same at both poles … say what?

I will say that I am overjoyed that the world of climate contains far more mysteries than answers …

“When nothing is for sure, we remain alert, perennially on our toes. It is more exciting not to know which bush the rabbit is hiding behind than to behave as though we knew everything.”
—Carlos Castaneda, in The Teachings of Don Juan

My best to all adventurers in this most marvelous universe,

Thanks for your good wishes Willis, but there is a big black fly in the marvellous universal ointment. No sooner had a potentially enlightening discussion begun than darkness descended from on high:

At the risk of repeating myself:

What do you suppose the effect of ice-albedo feedback will prove to be over the next 10 years or so? Or if you prefer over the last 10 years or so?

And why “remove the seasonality”. As you correctly pointed out over there, “When the ice is mostly there the sun mostly isn’t”.