I am among many with a specific sort of OCD – habitually fetching up the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado for the latest measure of Arctic sea ice extent. Sometimes I hunt further, to check estimates of the volume of the sea ice up there. Those latter measures are scarier, but have bigger error bars. The maps of extent are from real data, from satellites, with only enough modeling to translate the percentage of grid squares that have ice on them into a sharp-edged map of the ice's expanse. They are easily read, whereas maps of ice thickness, however more disturbing, are messy things (The Polar Science Center at U. of Washington keeps such data).
Why bring this up? There is no objective news reason to round up media stories on the Arctic's climate markers rght now. But yesterday I blew my stack. I cannot rid myself easily of the fury. Hence, a hoped-for restorative posting to force a close encounter with more sensible writings.
Here's the trigger. The bots of Google gleaned it. It is the meat of one among many of the mega-service's news alerts that I set up. It is supposed to (and does a generally good job) find news stories on Arctic sea ice.There ain't no news here from any kind of journalist worth spit:
- Sunshine hours blog : Arctic Sea Ice 2013 – Where is the Death Spiral?: The lede of this post by an author with a name not easy to find (and I have not) on the site, is "If someone claims Arctic Sea Ice is in a death spiral, you can mention that right now 2013 is the 7th lowest and not the lowest."
The blog's point is that things are doing just fine up north. Why do I let these things bother me? After all there are so many similar, enthusiastic idiocies circulating these days on climate, mostly by the contrarian crowd but enviros do the doofus act sometimes just as well. The level of misleading-by-omission errors and muddles in this one are however so concise and blunt it mix-mastered my blood to a froth. Its main piece of factual evidence is a plot showing a bunch of traces of Arctic sea ice extent, apparently centered on the last four weeks and the next four, showing how this year's trace compares to other recent ones. The blithely ignored falsehoods of the supporting text include 1) The implied assumption that this time of year has anything much to do with where the ice will wind up and 2) That some sort of meaning ought be attached to the fact that the ice's extent is greater today than it was this date in 1989! Oh right, case closed, no problem. Although it is there in the plot if one looks at it, the author does not even tell readers who his bamboozlement targets that the plot offers other non-insights of the exact opposite if superficial vector. If you look close you'll see today's ice extent is not merely an also ran in the lowest-ever-so far derby, it is simultaneously below last year's. And 2012, don't we all recall, went on to blow apart the record for low sea ice at the end of melt season. In other words, the post's proffered data are so limited as to reveal absolutely nothing remotely like the writer says they do. It just a snapshot of an ambiguous time of year's data.
If you'd like broader context from people who merit their PhDs, follow the link to NSIDC in the first graf up there. I won't even get into the bloggist's concern that media chart avidly Arctic sea ice losses, but ignore Antarctica's sea ice. But fortunately one of the news stories coming up that the bottom, from PBS, does so.
In the meantime, last year's record-low sea ice and the weeks and months of research since then have generated a fairly steady media stream. Some stories link the unusually open, sunlight-absorbing water of late summer and fall with recent changes in habits of the circumpolar arctic jet stream. The winds' paths are much loopier than they usually are. As the Arctic warms, it appears, the border between it and more temperate latitudes (ours) is breaking down. The wall is gone. The Arctic is becoming part of the same circulation system that we in N. America inhabit. But the winter Arctic is still awfully dark and cold. So the newly nomadic jets bring gouts of Arctic ocean breezes much farther south than they usually do. Maybe that's why just two weeks ago, from a jet's window, I saw huge expanses of fresh snow across western Minnesota and the Dakotas. Looked like mid-January down there. The wandering Arctic gusts also return north bearing a load of our warm air, setting up further melt. That, at least, is how I interpret recent news versions of scientific studies.
Recent Media stories on Arctic Sea Ice and related CO2-driven changes up there:
- Accuweather.com : Arctic Sea Ice Update ; This is better categorized as a press release than news story, but is on the exact same topic and is a miracle of sanity compared to that random blogger about whom I just finished ranting.
- Christian Science Monitor – Pete Spotts: With Arctic sea ice vulnerable, summer melt season begins briskly/The Arctic saw a record loss of summer sea ice in 2012, and the 2013 melt is off to a faster start than a year ago. Another record is undertain, but warming has sapped the ice's staying power; Pretty good simile here. (First of course recall that the CSMonitor's publishing hq are in Boston). Spotts declares that predicting where the ice will wind up this year, based on now, is like "predicting that the Boston Red Sox, with the best record in baseball coming out of April, will sweep the World Series next fall." His references to thick multi-year ice getting rare is another way of saying the volume of the ice is shrinking drastically. It's interesting that changing currents are shipping a lot of the old, thick ice into more southerly seas and a fast melt. Could be a parallel to the wandering atmospheric jets streams that appear to be blending the Arctic and sub-Arctic and maritime, northern mid-continent climes into a more unitary system.
- PBS News House – Rebecca Jacobson: The Antarctic's Ice Paradox: Which explains why the seemingly opposite sea ice and ice cap trends at the two poles (vastly different places, one with a continent in the center and the other an ocean) can both be seen as tied to global warming while not, as our blogger wants it, requiring cognitive dissonance. This gets into the history in good fashion, and pins the spreading sea ice on the higher freeze point for fresh water – a lens of which is sliding outward atop the Southern Ocean from the continent's melting ice sheets.
- DeSmogBlog – Brendan DeMelle: Animation of Arctic Sea Ice Minimum Volume, 1979-2012 ; Another blog, this one from the saner side. It extols a video making crystal clear the severity of the loss of sea ice volume in the last 30+ years.
- Weather Underground/Live Science – Andrea Thompson: Sea Ice Loss Could Alter Arctic Air Chemistry ; The specific topic – air chemistry and particularly its bromine, is arcane. But as an account of scientific process this is terrific. The rich sketch of the vast changes in the Arctic sweep one into the belly of a study of one specific effect, amplifying the impression of deep, fundamental alteration of one of Earth's more distinct, iconic regions.
- Financial Post (Canada) Lawrence Solomon: Arctic sea ice back to 1989 levels, now exceeds previous decade ; Whoa. Had I seen this before the blog post cited at top and that set me off, I'd a led with it. First, one now suspects where the pilloried blogger up top got his reference to 1989 sea ice. Second, this is beyond delusional in its logic. Mr. Solomon's point, which this conservative pub. labels a comment, appears to be that the ever-speedier growth by sea ice in the two months prior to its annual, late-winter early-spring maximum is a sign of the "comeback of the Arctic ice"!! Welcome to crazy land. Well of course it's a big comeback. If the Arctic used to hang on to most of its ice extent year around but no longer does, then it must now have to refreeeze like crazy to put a scrum of thin ice across the region during the winter freeze. And if one keeps falling into deeper and deeper holes, one has to do more vigorous climbing to get set to fall into the next one.
- Reuters – Alister Doyle: Acidification:the latest unknown for stressed Arctic ecosystem ; Doyle reminds us what we learned in high school chemistry – cold water absorbs more gas, including CO2. The Arctic's still cold. Now it is largely exposed directly to the air.
- Alaska Dispatch – Mark Serreze: Sea ice loss affects much more than just the Arctic; I thought this to be a news story by a news reporter but it is not. But worth leaving up. This is an expert summary by the director of the Nat'l Snow and Ice Data Center.
- Alaska Public Media – Steve Heimel: Scientists Study Peculiar Arctic Sea Ice Cracking ; News has been going around on this phenomenon, wish we'd tracked and rounded up coverage earlier. The gist is fascinating – observation of vast patterns of radiating cracks, running for hundreds of miles, in the winter sea ice cover. The supposition is that because it's so thin it breaks as a simple membrane, like an eggshell, and the cracks just keep moving in a coherent pattern through the more or less uniform medium. Something like that. This is a fine story, including word on the worries subsistence whaling crews that put out of Barrow Alaska as the thinning ice gets farther away. Richard Glenn, director of the lonely, famed (in certain circles) Barrow Arctic Science Consortium, based at an old IGY Navy lab on the strand north of town, and a Univ. of Alaska man describe what they are seeing. Cool video of the satellite view of this thing.
- Inside Science News Servicee – Ryder Diaz: Arctic Sea Ice Leaves Record-Small Footprint ;
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