Tag Archives: Beaufort Sea

“Real Science” Censorship – Episode 2

Censorship, , , ,

After having a brush with the “Real Science” censor last month I’ve really gone and done it now. Steven Goddard’s blog has been badmouthing Al Gore recently. I’m afraid I couldn’t let that slight on Al’s predictive abilities go unchallenged. Steve evidently didn’t care for my suggestion that he “is fond of poetic license”, so my alter ego is “now spam” there too:

I’ve cut out much of the gratuitous abuse in the ensuing conversation, but you can peruse an archived version if you so desire. Note amongst other things that Al Gore never mentioned “16 foot thick ice in the Beaufort Sea”. Here are the expurgated highlights:

Them:

Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Al Gore says that the 16 foot thick ice in the Beaufort Sea will all melt in the next few weeks.

http://www.examiner.com/article/gore-arctic-ocean-ice-free-as-early-as-2014

Us:

“Some of the models suggest that there is a 75 percent chance that the entire north polar ice cap during some of the summer months will be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years,” Gore said in 2009.

There’s still plenty of time left for some of the models to be proved 75% correct!

 

Them:

“Some models suggest.” I love that – so very scientific. Some do, others don’t.

 

Us:

I realise Steve is fond of poetic license, but my point is that in the article Steve references Al Gore did not “predict an ice free Arctic in 2014″. He didn’t even “predict an ice free Arctic by 2016 at the latest”

 

Them:

I have warned you numerous times about lying about me. This is your last warning
http://www.examiner.com/article/gore-arctic-ocean-ice-free-as-early-as-2014

 

Us:

Steve – My Gore quote from April 15, 2014 at 10:41 am is cut/pasted from the article you just linked to. Here’s another quote from the same article, presumably a journalist’s interpretation of Gore’s words:
“Today at the U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen, Al Gore said there is new computer modeling that suggests the Arctic Ocean may be nearly ice-free in the summertime as early as 2014.”

 

Them:

“Some of the models suggest that there is a 75 percent chance that the entire north polar ice cap during some of the summer months will be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years,” Gore said.
Attack Gore for being an idiot. Not me for reporting on it.

 

Us:

Unpublished comment on Steven Goddard's "Real Science" blog from Wednesday April 16th at 12:55 UTC
Unpublished comment on the “Real Science” blog from Wednesday April 16th at 12:55 UTC

 

Them:

They have so far neglected to publish the above comment.

 

Us:

We’ll keep you posted!

New Arctic Sea Ice Resources

Volume, , , , , ,

Stung by some unusually constructive criticism from Anthony Watts we have (somewhat hurriedly) added several new pages to the Great White Con “Resources” section of this web site. They contain the sort of information that is rather tricky to update automatically on a daily basis, and concentrate on resources that help the interested searcher after truth get a handle on the thickness and hence volume of the sea ice in the Arctic, on a regional as well as pan Arctic scale.

The first section is entitled “Arctic Sea Ice Graphs“, and here’s an example of one graph which reveals the ice volume in various regions of the Arctic, based on the output of the PIOMAS model:

PIOMAS regional volume breakdown for March 2014
PIOMAS regional volume breakdown for March 2014

[Graph by Chris Reynolds on the Dosbat blog]

The second section is entitled “Ice Mass Balance Buoys“. As the name hopefully suggests, this section displays data reported by the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory’s currently active ice mass balance buoys in a variety of novel formats. These buoys are deployed on a regular basis at selected locations across the Arctic, and report on a number of different parameters including snow depth, ice thickness and temperature. By way of example here’s a couple of reports from IMB 2013F, which was originally deployed last August on what was then classified as “first year” ice in the Beaufort Sea. First of all here’s the Google Maps/Earth view that reveals how the buoy has moved around the Arctic since then, and shows how clicking on one of the “pushpins” reveals the values of a variety of interesting metrics on a daily basis:

Google map of the movement of IMB 2013F
Google map of the movement of IMB 2013F

As you can see, last August the thickness of the ice floe that the buoy is located upon was 1.4 metres thick. If you click through to the live map and experiment you will discover, amongst a variety of other things, that the ice under the buoy is now 1.68 meters thick, with an additional 49 cm of snow on top of that.

A second set of images shows graphs revealing the temperature above, below and within the ice, currently on a monthly basis:

2013F-Temp-20140401

Click on the graph to view a larger version. This one requires a certain amount of interpretation, but the first thing to note is that the numbers across the top represent the position of thermistors spaced 10 cm apart on a pole that is mounted vertically through the ice floe. Number 1 is in the air above the floe, the rightmost side of the graph (number 26 in this case) is in the water below the ice floe, and somewhere in between those extremes the temperature sensors can also be in the midst of either ice or snow.

At the end of March the interface between ice and snow in this case was somewhere between sensors 8 and 9, and hence at a temperature of around – 7 degrees Celsius, by which time the buoy had moved from the Canadian waters where it started into the area of the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska.

For further discussion about the interpretation of our new resources please use the comment section on the “About Our Arctic Sea Ice Resources” page. For technical observations and suggestions for improvements feel free to comment below!

 

 

The Truth About Arctic Sea Ice Thickness

Thickness, , , ,

Shock News! According to Steven Goddard last week “The Arctic continues to recover“. However some fresh new evidence has been uncovered today:

Them:

ACNFS forecast for Arctic sea ice thickness on March 11th 2014, from the March 3rd model run
ACNFS forecast for Arctic sea ice thickness on March 11th 2014

[Image from the 1/12° Arctic Cap HYCOM/CICE/NCODA archive]

Meanwhile over on Twitter:

Us:

 

 Them:

 

 Us:

PIOMAS gridded Arctic sea ice thickness for February 2014
PIOMAS gridded Arctic sea ice thickness for February 2014
SMOS Arctic sea ice thickness comparison for March 1st 2011-14
SMOS Arctic sea ice thickness comparison for March 1st 2011-14

[Images courtesy of Wipneus on the Arctic Sea Ice Forum]

Russia’s Northern Shores

Concentration, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Regular readers will have realised by now that we’ve been pestering the Mail and The Telegraph with telephone calls and emails for weeks now. That’s because, as The Economist put it last weekend:

There are climate facts—and facts are stubborn things.

Both The Mail and The Telegraph have now corrected a couple of the gross inaccuracies they printed (virtually and/or physically) on September 8th, but many more remain. One of those is the identical phrase in both articles saying:

An unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia’s northern shores.

The fact of the matter is that this statement is untrue. I’ve recently received a couple of letters about this from “The Daily Telegraph” signed by “Robert Winnett, Head of News”. Here’s an extract from the first one:

Them:

Reputable evidence exists to show an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia’s northern shore.  This can be seen on the National Snow and Ice Data Center’s website [in the article] “A Real Hole Near the North Pole“.  The site states that the average ice extent for August 2013 was 6.09 million square kilometres, which is more than half the size of Europe.

Us:

Have I got news for you Robert!  If you’d read any of the articles on here, or watched any of the videos I linked to in my emails, that wasn’t the “fact” I was quibbling about. The fact is that the Arctic “ice sheet” was not “unbroken” and did not “stretch… to Russia’s northern shore” on September 8th 2013 and for considerable periods of time both before and after that date. Here’s an extract from The Telegraph’s second letter:

Them:

In reply to your enquiry, the Telegraph’s policy is to correct clear inaccuracies once we are alerted to them – and in appropriate cases update articles on our website.

Us:

I thought I’d already made this perfectly plain, but evidently not, so here’s yet another alert about clear inaccuracies in the “reporting” of climate science in The Telegraph: