O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” He chortled in his joy.
It has been brought to my attention (slightly belatedly) that in the run up to COP26 David Rose is once again pontificating about Arctic sea ice on Twitter. I have been in discussion about the “recently discovered” polynya in the so called “Last Ice Area” north of Ellesmere Island for a few days. Then this morning I discovered via a heads up from “ClimateVariability” that Mark Lynas has been tweeting about it too:
My Arctic alter ego and I were of course “blocked” by David Rose on Twitter many moons ago, and he has been quite quiet about the Arctic of late. However what with one thing and another he has now resumed his controversial commentary on the High North by commenting on Mark’s missive as follows:
We’ve been following the voyage of the Canadian icebreaker CCGS Amundsen as he circumnavigated Banks Island. Now Amundsen is about to set off on the final leg of his 2021 Arctic campaign to conduct the “DarkEdge” study in northern Baffin Bay. According to the Amundsen Science web site:
7 October to 3 November – Cambridge Bay to Quebec City
During the final Leg of the 2021 Expedition, an integrated study (DarkEdge) will take place at the ice edge to study the key processes taking place during the fall-winter transition in northern Baffin Bay. The Sentinel North program will deploy an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) and contribute to the Dark Edge campaign. The CCGS Amundsen will sail to Quebec City for the end of the annual expedition on November 3rd.
and according to Christian Katlein from the Alfred Wegener Institute:
The Canadian Ice Service daily charts don’t currently cover the north of Baffin Bay, so here’s the most recent weekly which provides some idea of what Amundsen will be facing over the next few weeks:
As Amundsen prepares to begin his voyage to the DarkEdge, here’s a watery sun setting over Cambridge Bay last night:
[Edit – October 11th]
Here’s the eighth video in Christian’s Sea Ice Stories series and the first from Amundsen itself, whilst moored in Cambridge Bay:
[Edit – October 12th]
Amundsen has finally located a smidgen of sea ice in Baffin Bay, at approximately 76.10 N, 77.10 W. Click to enlarge:
[Edit – October 13th]
Amundsen has managed to find some more significant sea ice, this time located at around 76.30 N, 78.70 W:
It seems Tony didn't bother to read the references in the @IPCC_CH's #FAR that he quoted earlier.
Had he done so he would have discovered that when USS Nautilus sailed under the #NorthPole in 1958 it found the mean ice draft to be 5.32 meters.#TruthDecay#ClimateBall™
"I'm pretty sure that ice doesn't grow during record heat"
Tony seems unaware that the #Arctic isn't the entire planet, that #SeaIce melts in summer, and that summer surface temperatures in the high Arctic are held close to the melting point.#TruthDecay#ClimateBall™
Needless to say Tony has yet to answer my final question.
[Edit – October 16th]
Needless to say Tony Heller has yet to answer any of my recent questions. What’s more despite the exhortations of one of his band of merry (mostly) men he has declined to engage in a public debate with me:
With my alter ego blocked I’ve been debating with some of Tony’s band of merry (mostly) men whilst wearing my normal attire. One of them requested the opinion of Judah Cohen and Big Joe on Tony’s cherry pick du jour:
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:
By way of a change we start this month’s look at all things Arctic with some sea ice statistical analysis. Anthony Watts’ Arctic porky pie production line has been speeding up recently, and I am not the only one who has noticed. As part of his takedown of the latest “skeptical” allegations against the United Kingdom Met Office Tamino has been looking at trends in Arctic sea ice extent over at his “Open Mind” blog:
First and foremost, the yearly minimum is only one day out of the year. We have sea ice extent data throughout the year, and what happens during the rest of the year counts. Instead of using the annual minimum, let’s use the annual average. To avoid losing the most recent data, I’ll compute the yearly average for October through the following September rather than the usual (but arbitrary) January through December. I’ll also omit October 1978 through September 1979 because that year is incomplete. I get this:
The annual averages show much less fluctuation than the annual minima, so we can estimate things like rates of change with greater precision. I find that there is statistical evidence that the rate changed over time. One model of such changes uses three straight-line segments with their changes chosen to best-fit the data, like this:
We reported on the first ICESat-2 sea ice thickness data to be released back in May. We are now very pleased to be able to reveal that the data up to April 2021 is now available for download from the NSIDC web site. Here’s a visualisation of April’s data:
For comparison purposes here’s the CryoSat-2/SMOS equivalent:
ICESat-2 looks to have captured the arm of thicker ice extending across the Beaufort Sea suggested by sea ice age data better than CryoSat-2:
However thickness data is totally absent where leads are absent, in land-fast ice for example. It seems that near real time ICESat-2 processing isn’t available as yet, but we await the release of the data for October with barely bated breath!
During the 4 years of the Donald Trump presidency the cryodenialosphere has been relatively quiet. However now that Joe Biden is in charge of the land of the free that happy state of affairs is changing.
First of all it is my solemn, if belated, duty to award the 2020 grand prize of the loan of another polar bear suit kindly donated by the Daily Telegraph plus a battered big board from Cotty‘s quiver to Tommy Barlow, occasional visitor to the Arctic Sea Ice Forum, with the following bon mots:
Fuck off, clique hobbit, shit-for-brains.
Getting back to 2021, several candidates have thrown their hat into the ring over the past few days. In order of appearance:
1) Sami Ilvonen on Twitter with the (partially now deleted):
2) Jeff Tonna on Twitter who insulted two alleged “climate nutters” whilst simultaneously invoking the spirit of Albert Einstein:
3) Matt Sissons on Twitter who assures me that “I don’t believe I’ve being rude to you”. Amongst other misdemeanours Matt was certainly on a roll on October 13th:
4) David Appel at Judith Curry’s “Climate Etc.” blog. According to his baby bio on Twitter David is a “Freelance science writer. PhD, physics”. I can only assume that amongst his other shortcomings David has never seen my Twitter C.V.:
With the COP26 conference starting in Glasgow in just over a month, and fresh from watching Boris Johnson invoking the spirit of Kermit the Frog in The Muppet Christmas Carol, it was an unanticipated pleasure to watch this speech by Mia Mottley, the Prime Minister of Barbados, to the United Nations’ General Assembly:
I highly recommend that you watch the entire speech. Whilst making numerous compelling points, especially regarding climate change, Mia also invoked the spirit of one Robert Nesta Marley:
Get up, stand up! Stand up for your rights! Get up, stand up! Don’t give up the fight!
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:
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