Bishop Hill The Royal and the Arctic
Sep 22, 2014 Climate: other The Royal Society is holding a scientific meeting today on the Arctic and climate change, beautifully timed to coincide with the annual minimum in Arctic sea ice. Unfortunately, the ice, which looks to have passed the minimum over the weekend, has recovered again this year, so no headlines were garnered.
Readers can see a bit of what is going on at the meeting by visiting the RSArctic14 hashtag and it looks pretty interesting. I was amused to see that Julienne Stroeve seems to be tentatively suggesting that the recovery in Arctic sea ice in the last couple of years has made the GCM predictions look rather clever. Put next to their failure in the Antarctic, it feels more like luck than judgement, but perhaps that's just my natural cynicism about climate models.
It does seem to me that we are at an interesting point for the Arctic. In the next few years, natural variability enthusiasts and global coolers are predicting continuing ice recovery. Climate models are telling us that the decline will continue.
We watch with interest.
Bishop Hill
The sea ice itself may have missed its cue, but a press release seems to have gone out anyway. The Sunday Times apparently reported yesterday that the North Pole will be ice-free within five years.
Bishop Hill
BH favourite Peter Wadhams seems to have created something of a stir:
Reader Comments (68)
For collectives, do refer to 'An Exultation of Larks' by James Lipton 1968 & 1977.
It has the lovely murmuration of starlings, an incredulity of cuckolds and many more gems.
A projection of climate scientists?
Geoff.
E.Smiff
That sounds like a politician bemoaning a lost election, or an enlightenment philosopher. Hobbs or Malthus?
I have in mind the Anazazi, the Maya or the Romans. These civilisations were built during periods of favourable conditions.They ended when the conditions changed.
We operate on a global agricultural and resource base but this does not make us immune to collapse. It just increases the scale!
An Asylum of climate scientists would appear to fit the bill...
Sceptics vary from lukewarmers to sky dragon slayers; few of you agree among yourselves, let alone anyone else.
A:"cacophany" of sceptics?
Since we have the bloody photos of submarines at the north pole in ice free water in the 1950's and later, can we point out this Wadham entirely fits the description of climate kook? Or can we look to the shamelessness of how he skips over the earlier failed predictions of Arctic doom and doubles down as evidence of his derangement? And of course tossing in the methane scam is just dressing on his apocalypse salad.
And the interesting thing is that his colleagues only make mild criticisms of Wadham's bs. The man is waving his arms and making scary sounds to keep the gullible faithful in line.
And his mild mannered colleagues are directly profiting from Wadham's confabulated bs.
How dare these deniers refute Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth that the Pole will melt by 2010.
These flat-earth sceptics must be in the pay of the Koch Brothers.
Next thing you know they'll be claiming there were not 50 to 200 million Climate refugees by 2010!
have they no respect for Science?
/sarc
EM
It is the Dark Mountain manifesto.
http://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/
Ivy League (Dartmouth College) professor of environmental studies, Michael K. Dorsey referred to Dark Mountain in the following way in the Guardian.
'Everyone should stay vigilant and keep their danger sniffers on full alert when the likes of those high on the Dark Mountain and others associated with "deep ecological" tendencies get on about "crises" of "humanity." Sadly, we have a great deal of evidence now, that such 'dark' tendencies have been built upon a legacy of misanthropic meandering, petty eco-fascism and immigrant bashing-- souped up in talk of waywardness from the "myth[s] of human centrality"--by the likes of Teddy Goldsmith, the gaggle of old Ecologist sods, inter alia, some of whom helped precipitate the Cornerhouse'.
http://discussion.guardian.co.uk/comment-permalink/5160452
My collective noun would be a clot of climatologists.
This is how real science is done
Sure enough, in the weeks that followed, other researchers pointed out that the signal that BICEP2 detected may have been attributable to the polarization of light caused by dust in our galaxy. The BICEP2 team certainly knew that dust could also polarize light in a similar way to gravitational waves, but they used a model, based on the data that was available from the Planck satellite, that, the other researchers pointed out, may have underestimated the amount of dust in the part of the sky they were studying.
http://www.insidescience.org/blog/2014/09/23/you-cannot-ignore-dust
Hunter
You can't have it both ways.
Do the three submarines at the North Pole show that the Arctic is already ice free and that Professor Wadham's prediction has already come true? :-)
E. Smiff
Regrettably Dorsey is underestimating the real problems incoming.
E. Smiff
Notice that the BICEP2 team are already working to update their work in the light of this new evidence.
My point is that you have a set of apocalyptic views that drives you on.
'BICEP2 team are already working to update their work'
Like Michael Mann !
If this is what he says now then I cannot let him get away with this. He said the Arctic would be ice-free NO LATER than 2016. I have been collecting his predicitions and posted them on WUWT.
Jimbo -
Yes, Wadhams has an extreme view of the Arctic decline. The Twitter comments on his latest talk make it clear that this is not a mainstream view, yet he always seems to grab headlines with his pronouncements.
He seems to have extended his predictions from reaching an "ice-free" state -- apparently defined as an ice extent less than 1 million sq km at the Sept. minimum -- to a longer period. So you can add to the list: "within five years or so we could be seeing an ice-free Arctic for up to four months in the summer."
History is not with you, O Entropic one. If we are to see a new dark age, it will not be because of "the combined stress of overpopulation, resource depletion and climate change, with no human management involved". It will be the usual human hubris, the decadence of the social mores and the greed and self interest of the politicians and those that will take advantage of them. Business as usual in fact. The age old cycle.
Reduced solar forcing, producing negative North Atlantic Oscillation conditions, causes an increases in Arctic sea ice loss. Increased GHG forcing in theory should make the NAO more positive.
A "death rattle" of climate scientists?