Vocal Voices

In the last three weeks or so there has been a furore going on in the climate science circles in the UK.

First the Daily Manipulate and others have been banging on about how the Arctic Ice has recovered a full 30% since the 2012 disastrous melt and month long storm which seriously disrupted the Arctic ice so badly.

Second the Times did something which I will find very hard to believe is anything other than a sting on Dr Peter Wadhams. Basically a reporter met with him to, ostensibly, discuss the state of the Arctic ice and wound up accusing him of (currently, today), believing that his three colleagues who died so close together and so suddenly, was assassination. These charges of the "totally batty professor" were then taken up by all and sundry in the right wing press until Dr Wadhams made a complaint to IPSO. Then the press basically circled the wagons and stood their ground.

So, whilst the Climate Watching community I inhabit talks about terms like "Dead Cat bounce" and "pause" and "slight recovery", nobody is under any doubts that this short interlude is nothing more than that. The atmosphere continues to warm and whilst that continues to happen, the ice will continue to melt. Because the North and South poles are the temperature regulators of the planet, when it heats up they shrink to compensate.

So let's see what the press are talking about. Let's take yesterday, the latest image for 2015 as a benchmark. We have another 6 weeks of melting to go and we should be seeing a trend which shows that the ice is getting better.

Before getting into the images, I've used the concentration graphs. It's simple, deep purple is 100% ice. Anything else has patches of open water. yellow is 25% open water. Green is 50% and blue is 100%.

2012, the outlier year which broke all records.



Ok so this was before the big storm struck but you can see the NW passage is already virtually open but the northern sea route is not.

2013 the recovery year. It broke no records of any kind. Either winter growth area, melt area or temperatures.



2014, the evidence for the "recovery" stance. Again it broke no records.



It's quite clear that there is more ice. 2014 was beset with constant storms, hardly any sunlight until very late in the season and very low summer temperatures.

Although as you can see what they call the Laptev Bite nearly reached 85N.

2015 started slow, late and with, supposedly, higher volume than when 2012 started it's melt season. 2010/11 had preconditioned the pack for 2012 so it's not that much of a surprise that 2012 happened.



Now I'm just a simple guy, but that picture doesn't really look like recovery to me. Now here's a more interesting thing. The thick ice is supposed to be mainly in the Canadian Archipelago, in front of the Archipelago and Greenland and in a curve round the Beaufort and towards the East Siberian sea.

As you can see, that curve is almost entirely yellow, green or blue.

I don't find it any surprise that the press had to go after Dr Wadhams. He was driven off the road by a truck around the time that his colleagues died. When they all died in such a short space of time, he was worried. Wouldn't we all be. However when the investigations were done and it was proven that they were all accidents, Dr Wadhams was quite relieved.

But the press need something to manipulate people with. Because, by all the signs, 2015 is going to be another surprise year in the Arctic and that just doesn't fit with the noises the press are making....

The press is certainly necessary. Even vital, to the functioning of our country. What it should not be is a necessary evil.

I have just been watching President Obama speaking about this, and I am encouraged by what he is saying. It is not enough, but it is a start.

The US is second to China as the worst polluter. Obama's moves will put it behind India and Russia, but nowhere near Europe.

Time is running out, and even some former deniers are beginning to see this. These are good signs. The one thing that is not being tackled is world population, and that does depress me. Each new individual requires water, food, energy and a roof over their heads, and we are not dealing with those problems.

We need to put a brake on population growth, then reduce it, otherwise we are wasting our time.

Whilst the climate change lobby have been significantly disappointed with Obama for his lack of use of the correct words and not taking enough action for their concerns, I have been a staunch supporter of his approach. The lobby simply did not take into account his position vis a vis the tea party.

He has done more in his two terms to reverse our impact on climate change than any president before him, including Clinton. This latest act is a simple fact that he now Can do this because he has nothing to lose and it will not damage the party for him to do it either.

As for population, the rest of the world is fairly consistent in their approach. Their teeming billions (except for China), contribute less than the US and the western world.

So until the west cleans it's act up significantly we can't even engage in a population debate.

One thing at a time. It's the same thing I've been saying to the Climate lobby about Obama since he came to power.

One of the weaknesses of democracy is that those who want to do one thing have to persuade others to think the same. Obama is a victim of that, but thankfully he is a good guy. Things could go the other way.

As for the population, it is not what they contribute that counts, it is what they consume. Every single additional person requires x litres of clean water and y calories to survive. It makes not a jot of difference how much they add to the money-go-round - they have to be fed, watered, clothed and housed.

Resources to do the above are finite. Solving those problems are more pressing than the climate. In fact solving them would automatically reduce pressure on climate change.

All true. But they emit very little CO2.... So the argument turns...

They might not emit as much CO2 as the average Westerner today, but as they grow older and aspire more, then future generations will...

All I am saying is that for the world's population to live the Western lifestyle it has to be reduced.

In fact, if the whole world population wished to live in even the worst level of the West, and I do mean the very worst, the global population would have to reduce alarmingly.

Yep we know that. But all they heard was that the west was screwing the climate with their CO2 emissions and it was none of their fault.

Once we get the west's emissions under control, then next step is to get them to see their part of the puzzle and what to do about it.

I have noticed with my Indian colleagues that wealth and prosperity is breeding smaller families. It's quite interesting. Of course on our current trajectory, to give western wealth and prosperity to the 3rd world is to drive the climate off the cliff and out into freefall space.

I saw, yesterday, that a German institute had done a rough calculation of how geoengineering would work if we took the CO2 out of the atmosphere in a few decades. The answer was interesting and should have been predictable. The heat already sequestered in the deep oceans by that time would continue to impact the planet for thousands of years regardless of the state of CO2 in the atmosphere at that time....

Cold comfort that the denialists will also be destroying the welfare of their own progeny...

I see that the BBC's Environment Correspondent, Roger Harrabin, is using Obama's plan to have a good dig at what Europe and the UK are doing.

What he is not making clear is that the US baseline for emissions is 2005 whereas ours is 1990, or that we have been working on this for years and not just about to start.

He also forgets that the US has tens of thousands of square miles of uninhabited and non-agricultural flat deserts. They are at latitudes where the sun shines and the wind blows fairly constantly within a narrow range of speeds, even down to ground level, making them suitable for wind and solar generation. In these areas solar and wind could be combined to produce a more even flow of energy.

It also has remote high mountain valleys of the sort suitable for large scale pumped storage to harvest renewable energy.

Not to mention there are 300m people on a tract of land 6m square miles in the US. Unlike the 64m (or more like 72 if like me you don't like the figures), in our 250k square miles.

A little update on the whole situation up there in the Arctic. I alluded to the fact that there was much hullabaloo about some kind of "recovery" going on in the last two years.

So here's the ice Age chart. Note that red patch of 5m+ off The Canadian Archipelago in the Beaufort sea.



Now let's have a look at the daily Bremen ASI area overhead. Note this will change daily so every day you open the thread it will be the new day's image.



Which recovery was that? That ice is currently under the influence of a weak cyclone which is pushing it to the coastal water. Which is currently around 8 - 10c.

which you can see here. That is a dynamic image and if you want to see the surface temp, don't select the anomaly. The anomaly used to be good but when the bar only goes up to 4+c an the anomaly can now hit 10 - 15C it's usefulness is limited and it portrays a false picture.

All the same. This is an interesting year which his going to crush the Deniers. All Over Again....

The visual has updated above.

I've never seen a season like this and there appears to be nothing since 78 when satellite records began.

There is a lot of heat coming in from the pacific and over the next two weeks the watchers are speculating as to whether the building atmospheric low over the central arctic may suck in the dying northern tropical storms from the pacific.

It's interesting anyway, the Canadian Archipelago (CAA) is breaking up and drifting north instead of into the NW passage as other years.

I keep waking up, looking at the image and saying to myself "How did it do that". I've been expecting, for three weeks now, that I'll wake up and see a normal pattern start to exert itself. So far this has not happened....

It's rather interesting if you are interested in it. I'm very interested in the 50% open water heading for 85N and, in cases, further towards the pole.... Mid September is going to be interesting no matter which way it goes.