Polar bears observe another deadline floating by, face down
Mark Serreze, NSIDC’s doom sayer, seems to have realized that the impending failure of his prediciton of an ice free arctic as soon as 2012[Wrong, see comments] is getting a bit too close for comfort, and has back-pedalled. Now the ice free arctic may be a few decades rather than years away. This is a much safer prediction for Mark, he’ll have long retired by the time this one gets proved wrong. Just five months ago in September 2010 Serreze said:
“I stand by my previous statements that the Arctic summer sea ice cover is in a death spiral. It’s not going to recover…I hate to say it but I think we are committed to a four- to six-degree warmer Arctic.”
In this week’s ‘Nature’ he says:
“Although the paper by Tietsche and colleagues brings a more optimistic view of the Arctic’s future….”
“…. although the tipping-point argument can perhaps be laid to rest, we may nevertheless be looking at ice-free summers only a few decades from now.”
The paper Serreze refers to has this:
… every 20 years they artificially removed the entire sea-ice cover on 1 July. Instead of maintaining ice-free conditions, ice extent in September recovered to values typical of the reference runs within a couple of years, even in the later parts of the century. Tietsche, S., Notz, D., Jungclaus, J. H. & Marotzke, J. Geophys. Res. Lett.doi:10.1029/2010GL045698 (2011).
Meanwhile, Ice volume is looking like a real recovery is under way.
image courtesy of hidethedecline.eu
Update:
Commenter ‘Stephen’ correctly points out Serreze didn’t say 2012 and complains that the volume chart is ‘pseudoscientific junk’.
Here are the U.S. Navy PIPS charts for March 3rd 2008 and March 3rd 2011 for comparison. Draw your own conclusions.
.
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
There seems to be a chill wind spreading amongst even the most die-hard CAGW believer… 🙂
I’ve always thought Mark Serreze, of the NSIDC, was a gibbering buffoon and the only ‘death spiral’ was the one disappearing up his own a[self-snip]hole, caused by his convoluted thinking.
It’s perhaps no surprise that only a handful of ‘true believers’ now believe in the man-made global warming myth, and trust in scientists is at an all time low!
Tenuc
The chill wind is spreading amongst the die-hard politicians too, at least on this side of the pond. Arnold Schwarzenegger just reversed his “science is settled” position in a speech in which he said that too much of the national discussion on clean energy “is stuck in the debate over the science of global warming”. Barack Obama pointedly said nothing about climate change in his State of the Union speech, but he also said quite a lot about clean energy. Even Al Gore’s website now acknowledges the primacy of clean energy (“Join the movement to transition the U.S. to a clean energy economy and help solve the climate crisis”).
I think it’s not stretching things too far to say that the political battle of global warming has in fact already been fought and won, and the greens lost. They lost because they were unable to mobilize public opinion (Arnold S. admits that “We can’t talk about global warming, because people can’t relate to that.”). So now the greens are hauling down the global warming flag and raising the clean energy flag in its place (although this is a step in the right direction; some of the new proposals in fact make a lot of sense – see http://thebreakthrough.org/blog/2011/02/the_long_death_of_environmenta.shtml).
The flip side, however, is that once clean energy takes over the politicians won’t need climate scientists to back up their global warming platforms any more. So maybe the climate science bubble is about to burst. Stay tuned.
Now back to the Arctic.
I have this half-formed theory that the Arctic is the cradle of the earth’s climate and that what happens there is very important. The theory is based on observations which show a) that temperature variations are much stronger in the Arctic than elsewhere and b) that these variations are not only stronger in the Arctic, they BEGIN there. Then they move south, taking maybe two or three years to make it to the tropics. This may or may not falsify the theory of “polar amplification”, but “equatorial decay” would be a much better description of what’s actually going on.
How might Arctic sea ice extent figure into this? Well, we’re not going to find out by turning it into yet another global warming political football. What we need is objective science, not a barrage of politically-motivated pseudoscientific predictions of impending doom.
Serreze has never said ice-free by 2012, I’ve asked him. And that ice volume chart is a pseudoscientific joke.
Stephen,
My dodgy memory. Apologies to Mark Serreze. It was Gore who said 2012. I think Serreze said 2015 but I’ll check this and amend the post accordingly. Anybody know?
The ice volume is not easy to measure, but I wouldn’t describe the efforts of the scientists who attempt to quantify it as ‘pseudoscience’.
Please feel free to expand your opinion with some references.
No wonder there is confusion about what climate hoax promoter Mark Serreze said Rog, as it would seem that this supposed climate scientist confutes himself several time on his conjecture and seems to think that year to year variation in ice quantity is climate, when in reality we need to look at the 200y time scale.
First Arctic ice wasn’t in a death spiral, then it was in a death spiral, then it wasn’t in a death spiral, now it’s in a death spiral again!
Perhaps he needs a visit to confused.com… 🙂
Yeah. I think the 2015 date was Serreze saying that was when we needed to reach peak carbon to avoid catastrophe, or something. Ice free Arctic summer “within a few decades” seems to be the nearest we can pin him to a prediction at the moment.
This Mark Serreze is the same guy who has been saying recently that the cold snowy winters we’ve been having recently are caused by global warmng 🙂
Has anybody ever seen, heard, smelt or felt any dirty energy?
This is just the latest emotional ruburb from the PR machine.
We must not take it up or be taken up by it.