arctic ice increases 60%

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/09/09/arctic-sea-ice-up-60-percent-in-2013/

 

"[An ice-free Arctic is] definitely coming, and coming sooner than we previously expected,“ Walt Meier, a glaciologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md, told LiveScience last month. “We're looking at when as opposed to if.”

Noting the growth in ice, the Snow and Ice Data Center said that coverage was still well below the 30-year average. And the year over year growth in ice is “largely irrelevant,” argued The Guardian, noting that more ice is to be expected after the record low a year ago."

 

Some related stuff:
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/...720_1_murdoch-story-rupert-murdoch-journalism

Excerpts:
"Regular old-fashioned news (as honest a report as one can create of something that happened a minute ago) just isn't good enough anymore."
...
"Most likely all of that happened a long time ago in Britain, where people like the Australian Murdoch found an eager audience for the stinky mess that fronts many British tabloids. It was a numbers game in a media that depended more on circulation than advertising.
Tapping the smelly masses, that's what it's all about. Give them all the grit you can collect and dig deeper and deeper for anything that might titillate and sell that front page."

Another way to say - agenda-driven journalism at work.

 

No big surprise that after a record low, there would be more ice the next year. No one expects a new record every single year; you have to look at the long-term trend - which definitely shows the ice shrinking.

Measuring the surface area alone doesn't show the total ice loss anyway; you have to consider the volume. And I believe the average depth of the ice has been decreasing pretty steadily.

Interesting how some people will reject years of data, saying it proves nothing, then glom onto one year's figures and say it disproves everything.

 

http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/


http://nsidc.org/

 

Lol!

I wonder if any temperature measurements of the actual ice itself have ever been made over a long period of time.

I ask, basing my question on the scientific observation that although warm ice, say 25F, and cold ice, say -25F, may look the same, cold ice lasts longer and works better in my beer cooler.

I wonder if it takes a lot longer for an ice pack to get cold as compared to getting warmer. Getting colder might be a lineal operation, getting warmer might be an exponential one.

 

Not meaning much. Ice has only half of the thermal energy capacity of liquid water not to mention the melting process itself.
Liquid water 4186 J/(K·kg), ice 2060 J/(K·kg)
smelting 333000 J/kg (0 °C)

 

I'm just thinking that ice maintains it's shape until it melts, but warm ice melts quicker than cold ice. So, roughly, if no one's keeping track of the temperature of the ice pack itself and is basing and estimating it's rate of disappearance on it's size and time elapsed, without accounting for it's rising internal temperature, it will be like my beer cooler, in that all of a sudden the ice is gone and my beer's getting warm. Except in the case of the ice packs, what happens is all of a sudden the ice transitions from a solid to a liquid and all the water that has been locked up above sea level is released and the ocean levels rise very quickly.

Maybe.

So I was just wondering if anyone is keeping track of the temperature of the ice itself.

 

Minor detail - ice pack is already floating, therefore displacing its own mass already, therefore it melting has exactly zero effect on sea level.

The only 2 significant masses of ice that would affect sea levels if melted are the Greenland continental ice mass and the Antarctic continental ice mass.

Greenland glacial ice has been retreating for decades so something odd happening there. Not necessarily anything to do with AGW though as artifacts keep emerging from the Viking settlement period from under the retreating ice.

As for Antarctica, the plateau is both high and cold. It's going to take a lot more than a 4C temperature rise to have any effect at all.

Worse luck. I need a 1m sea level rise ASAP to allow me to launch my boat at the bottom of my yard.

PDW

 

How about this. Go chop up Antarctica, drag the pieces up to the equator and Viola!, your boat is floating in no time! Yes?

 

An interesting question, and one I don't have an answer to. I never claimed to be an expert...

If I have time, I'll try to run down an answer. Does anyone know, so they can save me the time and trouble?

 

Another article in the UK Daily mail:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...caps-grows-60-global-warming-predictions.html

To keep this relavant to boating, here is a relavant quote:

"The Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific has remained blocked by pack-ice all year. More than 20 yachts that had planned to sail it have been left ice-bound and a cruise ship attempting the route was forced to turn back"

 

To me it was enough to see the headline phrase ending with an exclamation mark. That particular says it all about the level of seriousness and journalistic objectivity of the cited article. A perfect illustration of my post #3.

 

Allthough the ice area covered is now larger than a year ago the ice mass is close the same. Besides most of the eastern part of the Arctic ocean (white on the left side of the Daily mail picture august 2013) is covered with drifting ice concentration about 50%. First time in the history it might become possible to a ship to sail to the North Pole.
http://www.arctic-lio.com/nsr_ice

BR Teddy

 

It is too bad that, for normal purposes, the Northwest Passage isn't usable for boat traffic due to the cooling climate.