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The unnoticed melt

Filed under: — group @ 9 September 2011

Guest commentary from Dirk Notz, MPI Hamburg

“Well, it’s not really good timing to write about global warming when the summer feels cold and rainy”, a journalist told me last week. Hence, at least here in Germany, there hasn’t been much reporting about the recent evolution of Arctic sea ice – despite the fact that Arctic sea ice extent in July, for example, was the lowest ever recorded for that month throughout the entire satellite record. Sea-ice extent in August was also extremely low, second only to August 2007 (Fig. 1). Whether or not we’re in for a new September record, the next weeks will show.



Figure 1: Evolution of Arctic sea-ice extent in July and August from 1979 until 2011. (NSIDC)

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Arctic sea ice minimum discussions

Filed under: — gavin @ 1 September 2011

Here is a continuation of the last Arctic sea ice discussion as we get closer to the 2011 minimum. All figures will update continuously.

JAXA Sea ice extent and area:




Cryosphere Today sea ice concentration:



Estimated sea ice volume from UW PIOMAS (updated every month):



Arctic sea ice discussions

Filed under: — group @ 20 July 2011

This is a thread to discuss issues related to the 2011 Arctic sea ice minimum. The following graphs will update every day:

JAXA Sea ice extent:



Cryosphere Today sea ice concentration:



How Soon is now?

Filed under: — gavin @ 7 July 2011

Willie Soon is a name that pops up every so often in climate ‘debate’. He was the lead author on the Soon and Baliunas (2003) paper (the only paper that has ever led to the resignation of 6 editors in protest at the failure of peer-review that led to its publication). He was a recent speaker (from 37.20) at the 2011 Heartland Institute conference, and can be counted on to produce a contrarian take on any particular issue that anyone might care about – ranging from climate, to mercury in fish and polar bear population dynamics.
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Lu: from ‘interesting but incorrect’ to just wrong

Filed under: — gavin @ 5 July 2011

Some readers might recall a story from a couple of years of ago relating polar ozone depletion to cosmic rays and the subsequent failure of predictions made using that theory. The idea came from from a Qian-B. Lu (U. Waterloo), and initially seemed interesting (at least to those of us who were not specialists). Perhaps cosmic ray induced chemistry was playing some part in releasing chlorine from CFCs as well as the more accepted idea of heterogeneous chemistry on polar stratospheric particles? Lu’s predictions for increased polar ozone loss in 2008/2009 as a function of the low solar activity (and therefore higher CR flux) did not come to pass. Worse (for this idea), new analyses demonstrated that the hypothesized CR-induced CFC loss wasn’t detectable at all.
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