No, not me, DC, who says I’m thinking of paying up – 2010 looks more and more like 2006, not 2007. And indeed the latest Jaxa stuff looks like good news for the good guys (that is me, in case you hadn’t realised):
And TS said:
Monckton is a blatant fraud who even lies about his own parliamentary status (or lack of status). Who cares what he has to say on some denialist blog? I would be interested to hear what you think is happening to the Arctic melt season. There was a lot of ghoulish pessimism a month ago, predictions of a huge melt this season and another record set for low had extent. What’s the real story on what’s happening, in your opinion?
Good question! Lets start off by getting rid of some disinformation, if I can, because really that is almost my only advantage. Look at the pic, and possibly at the hires version, and realise that there is almost no predictability of the September ice minimum from the early season activity. In particular, 2007 was totally unremarkable up until the beginning of July. Conversely, trying to predict from trends before July is very nearly worthless. Even now all I’d say is that there is no reason, from that pic, to expect anything very exciting from this year. C is looking for bids at intrade, where (2010 > 2009) is going for 45%. I’d still say it is 50-50 so that isn’t a very interesting offer. I’d take (2010 > 2007) like a shot, mind you.
That, of course, says very little about the various sat pix of actual ice concentration, and maybe the various ideas that the ice was looking a bit iffy. I don’t credit that much, either. Let me try to explain why. It depends on some modelling I did a while ago.
Impact of instantaneous sea ice removal in a coupled general circulation model (GRL, VOL. 34, L14502, 5 PP., 2007 doi:10.1029/2007GL030253 ) is a paper we did a few years ago, indeed one of the last things before I left science. David did most of it. We wanted to see how sensitive an ocean-atmosphere GCM was to initial conditions, specifically those to do with sea ice. So to begin with we did the simplest thing, which was to remove all the Arctic sea ice. We had planned to go on to do more sophisticated things, like take out 10 or 20% of the ice, but as it turned out even total removal of the ice made remarkably little difference, so we never did the more subtle tests. What happens is that the ice just grows back. It was at this point that I lost my belief in the “ah, but once the old ice goes away the new ice will crumble” stuff. Of course, this is a model not reality. And (slightly more subtlely) there is a wrinkle: of course when we remove the ice we’d left the sea “preconditioned” to grow more ice, because we didn’t touch the mixed layer state. So we tried again, this time warming the mixed layer to prevent sea ice reforming. And when we did that… well, still the ice grew back, but more slowly. So, absent evidence to the contrary, I don’t believe the “tipping point” stuff people talk about the Arctic ice.
Note that this says nothing about the long-term trend, which is of course downwards, as the world warms. But it does mean that my “prediction” for the year ahead is the long-term trendline plus a bound for noise (not forgetting to include “anomalous” years like 2007 and 2008 in the trend, because they are of course part of the natural variation, a mistake I made last year).
