Friday, July 31, 2015

The Strange Resiliency Of Sea Ice

by JASmius



Why can't we all just admit and agree that political climatologists don't know the first thing about climatology?:

Using new satellite data, researchers at University College London reported in Nature Geoscience on Monday that the total volume of sea ice in the Northern Hemisphere was well above average in the autumn of 2013, traditionally the end of the annual melt season, after an unusually cool summer when temperatures dropped to levels not seen since the 1990s.

“We now know it can recover by a significant amount if the melting season is cut short,” said the study’s lead author Rachel Tilling, a researcher who studies satellite observations of the Arctic. “The sea ice might be a little more resilient than we thought.”

Perhaps that's because you people keep expecting it to all flash into steam at the first cloud break.  Either than or you keep confusing sea ice with butter.

A steady decline in the extent of Arctic sea ice since the late 1970s has been....

....opportunistically....

....taken as a barometer of longer-term warming trends in the Northern hemisphere.

Just as harsher than "normal" winters in the mid-1970s were taken as a barometer that Earth was transforming into the Breen homeworld.  Boy, it turns out that climatology is hard, huh?

The U.S. Navy last year [was ordered to predict] that by 2030 the Arctic’s northern sea route could be ice-free and navigable for nine weeks every year.

And believe it or not, that was a moderate forecast, as Al Gore, if you'll recall, predicted that the Arctic polar cap would be gone entirely by two years ago - you know, when it had grown by approximately fifty percent.

Miss Tilling and her colleagues used new data....

They used data?  Non-cherry-picked?  Boy, if they keep doing wild, extreme, climate-denying things like that, they run the risk of becoming actual scientists.

....from the European Space Agency’s Cryosat-2 radar satellite, launched in 2010. For the first time, they measured changes in the overall volume of seasonal sea ice across the Arctic and Greenland. Until now, researchers have been able to track the extent of ice, but not its thickness.

In 2013, summer temperatures were about 5% cooler than the previous year and the volume of autumn ice jumped 41%, they said. [emphasis added]

Yeah, what the hell, if all else fails, conduct some measurements.  Who knows?  It just might work.

Exit question: All snark aside, is there any climatic Chicken Little prediction that has ever come remotely close to coming true?  The late-1970s anthropogenic ice age never  happened. Anthropogenic overpopulation didn't cause us all to starve to death in the 1980s.  Anthropogenic natural resource shortages never materialized in the 1990s.  We're still waiting on Ted Danza's prediction that "anthropogenic pollution" would kill everything in the oceans in the same decade.  And now the polar ice caps (plural) that were supposed to have vanished years ago turn out to be vastly more "resilient" than political climatologists wanted to believe, which is corroborated by the fact that some of them are being forced, wailing, kicking, screaming, and teeth-gnashing, to publicly admit it.

And aren't these some of the same people who deny that Islamic jihadism is Islamic?

Deny THAT, bitches.

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