Opposite sea ice trends? [Credits: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Joy Ng]
Climate modellers need yet more and bigger computers to stand a chance of eradicating faulty sea ice projections in the polar regions, apparently. Meanwhile, they believe there must be some ‘delay’ in their long-predicted but not (yet?) happening Antarctic sea ice decline. Quote: “Our study supports the hypothesis that climate models and projections of the Antarctic sea ice will be far more reliable as soon as they are capable of realistically simulating a high-resolution ocean, complete with eddies”.
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Despite global warming and the sea-ice loss in the Arctic, the Antarctic sea-ice extent has remained largely unchanged since 1979, says Eurekalert.
However, existing climate model-based simulations indicate significant sea-ice loss, contrary to actual observations.
As experts from the Alfred Wegener Institute have now shown, the ocean may weaken warming around Antarctica and delay sea-ice retreat.
Given that many models are not capable of accurately reflecting this factor and the role of ocean eddies, the study, which was just published in the journal Nature Communications, provides the basis for improved simulations and forecasts of the future development of the Antarctic.
Global warming is progressing rapidly, producing effects that can be felt around the world. The impacts of climate change are especially dramatic in the Arctic: since the beginning of satellite observation in 1979, the sea ice has declined massively in the face of rising global temperatures. According to the latest simulations, the Arctic could be consistently ice-free in summer before 2050, and in some years even before 2030.
Yet on the other side of the planet in Antarctica, the sea ice seems to have evaded the global warming trend. Since 2010, there have been more interannual fluctuations than in the previous period.
However, apart from a significant negative excursion in the years 2016 to 2019, the long-term mean sea-ice cover around the Antarctic continent has remained stable since 1979.
As such, the observable reality does not match the majority of scientific simulations, which show a significant sea-ice loss over the same timeframe.
“This so-called Antarctic sea-ice paradox has preoccupied the scientific community for some time now,” says first author Thomas Rackow from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI). “The current models cannot yet correctly describe the behaviour of the Antarctic sea ice; some key element seems to be missing. This also explains why the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, concludes that the confidence level for model-based projections of future Antarctic sea ice is low.”
In contrast, the models are already so reliable in the Arctic that the IPCC ascribes a high confidence level to their projections.
“With our study, we now provide a basis that could make future projections for Antarctica much more reliable.”
Continued here.
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Nature Communications: Delayed Antarctic sea-ice decline in high-resolution climate change simulations. [2022]
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
“the models are already so reliable in the Arctic that the IPCC ascribes a high confidence level to their projections.”
Please note “projections”. They are not confident enough to make predictions.
Antarctica has a good tax accountant. It is cooling, as the growth in sea ice attests. However the continent exports its cold, making this cooling harder to clearly observe. Antarctica is a major global site of downwelling formation of oceanic deep cold water – probably the biggest source. Downwelling from both poles – but more at the south – supplies the cold bottom water of the world’s oceans.
Something has to replace that descending saline cold water, and warmer surface waters from the surrounding southern ocean are drawn in. Superficially you can look at the inflow of warmer surface water and conclude “look – warm water flowing toward Antarctica, it’s OMG global warming!” But reflection on why it’s being drawn in tells another story.
And there’s evidence that this downwelling formation of cold deep water at Antarctica’s margin is increasing in recent years:
https://ptolemy2.wordpress.com/2022/01/13/antarctic-formation-of-cold-saline-deep-water-is-accelerating/
https://ptolemy2.wordpress.com/2020/09/12/widespread-signals-of-southern-hemisphere-ocean-cooling-as-well-as-the-amoc/
Curious George:
Is that the claim that the Arctic would be ice-free in the summer of 2012, 2013, 2015 or 2016? Or have I missed a later one?
As for the Antarctic should I point out that the UNSW “ship of fools” expedition in 2013/14 was stuck in pack ice 110kms. from where Mawson moored his ship in 1910/11? Unfortunately The Guardian and BBC members were saved.
“Our study supports the hypothesis that climate models and projections of the Antarctic Sea ice will be far more reliable as soon as they are capable of realistically simulating a high-resolution ocean, complete with eddies”.
They will fail again and again; better models of flawed theory will give a better wrong answer.
They do not consider cooling by thawing ice. The land ice is pushed into the turbulent saltwater currents and that chills the ocean water cold enough to form sea ice. They look only to the oceans and atmosphere, and they have never considered cooling by thawing ice. When land ice is depleted, ice quits pushing into the oceans and that allows sea ice to be removed and increases the evaporation and snowfall and replenishing of the land ice. After the land ice is replenished, the ice is again pushed into the oceans to form more sea ice and stop the more snowfall. The climate alarmists, the lukewarm and most skeptics make these same mistakes.
When less ice is pushed into the oceans, the warm tropical currents are not cooled and the climate does warm, warmer promotes more evaporation and snowfall and the more rapid rebuilding of the sequestered land ice.
These are a self-correcting, stable, alternating warm and cold cycles, in the polar climate cycles. The control forcing is the land ice pushed into the turbulent, tropical, saltwater currents, the control mechanism is the sea ice, the thermostat setting is the temperature sea ice forms and thaws.
CO2 does not change any of this. Milankovitch Cycles and CO2 cycles sometimes cycle in phase with these cycles and more often out of phase with these cycles, yet get more credit. That proves their theory and models right.
When the cycles are in phase, they capitalize on it and say that proves their theory and models right.
When the cycles are out of phase, they say nobody knows why it does not always work, and even that “well, sometimes it takes more than one cycle”
The facts are; their theories only work when they are in phase with the ice cycles. They say colder causes ice to advance and warmer causes ice to retreat. The facts are that advancing ice causes colder and retreating ice allows warmer.
Alex Pope
Reblogged this on Climate Collections.
They Wrote;
“This so-called Antarctic sea-ice paradox has preoccupied the scientific community for some time now,” says first author Thomas Rackow from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI).
I made some changes to the rest of what they wrote:
“The current models cannot yet correctly correlate with the behavior of the Antarctic Sea ice; some key element seems to be missing. This also explains why the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, concludes that the confidence level for model-based projections of future Antarctic Sea ice is low.”
In contrast, the models already correlate in the Arctic such that that the IPCC ascribes a high confidence level to their projections.
They use the same models in the Arctic and the Antarctic, if one correlates and one does not, that proves they just got lucky on the one that does.
So did this model correctly project the much higher Arctic sea ice this season?
I’ve a suspicion that eddies are chaotic systems whose evolution cannot be modelled well on climate timescales. You might get some better handle on degrees of turbulent mixing in a general setting, but changes may be the result of more unusual patterns developing which may or may not prove to be relatively stable or important.
It’s damned hard for anyone and especially “climate modelers” to admit they’re wrong…..
As such, the observable reality does not match the majority of scientific simulations, which show a significant sea-ice loss over the same timeframe. “This so-called Antarctic sea-ice paradox has preoccupied the scientific community for some time now,” says first author Thomas Rackow
Reality says no, computer says yes. Climate scientists call this a paradox 🤔
Who programmed the computer and supplied its inputs?
The Arctic shows no sign whatsoever of being ice free by summer 2030. You have to cherry pick a starting point for a non-trend trend to believe that.
Far too many climate scientists and modellers have convinced themselves they are right, in the same way the Covid modellers did, regardless of reality.
Honest, inquiring modellers would be trying to solve this paradox by modelling different hypotheses, not inventing more and more absurd “explinations”.
But . . . but . . . the Arctic being ice free would be a GOOD THING! Why the heck would you want your ocean to be covered with ice?
Rejoice that the Atlantic is ice free.
Alaska Science Forum, from May 12, 1983: Polar Ice: Problems with a Potential Natural Resource, Article #606 by Larry Gedney
“Resonance
Icebergs taller than a 50-story building and larger than the country of Belgium have been documented (it should be stressed here that we are speaking of fresh water ice derived from continental glaciers—not ice floes which are flat expanses of frozen sea water sometimes the size of small continents).
One might regard such a massive piece of real estate as being almost indestructible (except through melting, of course), but the fact is that they are remarkably fragile, and often unexpectedly shatter into many smaller fragments. The tendency for them to do this has long baffled investigators.
Now, Vernon Squire, an oceanographer with the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, England, may have discovered the reason. Squire and his colleagues mounted “strainmeters” on a number of icebergs in the Antarctic and monitored the small distortions resulting from the “surf” around the bergs’ margins. It was found that each iceberg has a unique resonant frequency of vibration, depending on its size and shape.
Although it would seem that ordinary ocean waves should have little effect on such a massive body, if the wave frequency matches that of the iceberg (or of one of its harmonics), the expansion and contraction induced could build to the point where the iceberg shatters.
A good analogy, says Squire, would be that of a singer’s voice shattering a wine glass. The process is then repeated with the smaller pieces, each of which has a higher resonant frequency, until the bulk has been reduced to the point that only waves of unattainable frequency could damage it further.”
Squire moved to New Zealand:
University of Otago:
“Waves are the principal determinant in the breakup of sea ice, acting both to fracture sheet ice initially into discrete ice floes and to limit the size of ice floes thereby formed. While mathematical models to predict how waves propagate into and through sea ice exist, they do not synthesize all we know about the properties of sea ice. In particular, this project investigates how the incessant action of intense waves in Arctic and Antarctic waters can hasten the eventual demise of sea ice, by gradually weakening it in the manner of the fatigue of an aircraft wing subjected to continuous oscillation in flight. The aim is to estimate the lifetime of sea ice in various scenarios.”
Reality confounds the modellers! Change the data!
“They do not consider cooling by thawing ice. The land ice is pushed into the turbulent saltwater currents and that chills the ocean water cold enough to form sea ice. They look only to the oceans and atmosphere, and they have never considered cooling by thawing ice. When land ice is depleted, ice quits pushing into the oceans and that allows sea ice to be removed and increases the evaporation and snowfall and replenishing of the land ice. After the land ice is replenished, the ice is again pushed into the oceans to form more sea ice and stop the more snowfall. The climate alarmists, the lukewarm and most skeptics make these same mistakes.
When less ice is pushed into the oceans, the warm tropical currents are not cooled and the climate does warm, warmer promotes more evaporation and snowfall and the more rapid rebuilding of the sequestered land ice.
….
The facts are; their theories only work when they are in phase with the ice cycles. They say colder causes ice to advance and warmer causes ice to retreat. The facts are that advancing ice causes colder and retreating ice allows warmer.”
I don’t disagree, but also I think polar ice provides insulation and less loss of Ocean temperature
And this ocean temperature determines global climate.
So loss of polar sea ice, will warm the land. Or short term warming effect, but long term cooling effect of entire ocean.
And I we get out of glaciation period, because the average temperature of ocean is 4 C or warmer.
Or if our ocean was 4 C, rather about 3.5 C, it would melt polar sea ice and warm the polar
region, but ocean would loses heat, while warming the polar region, and in thousands years
it could cool. But yes there would be more snowfall with this warmer ocean.
And it seems when ocean is 3.5 C we could enter glaciation period. But if ocean is 3 C, we definitely
be in glaciation period, but during the glaciation period, ocean warms up over thousands of
years, because the polar region has a lot polar sea ice which insulating the ocean and preventing heat loss.
So you have ocean of about 4 C or more, and have warm ocean surface temperature, which melts the polar sea ice and gives us the interglacial period. And interglacial period, is slow period of ocean cooling, results in going back to glaciation period.
“And this ocean temperature determines global climate.”
What on earth is a “global climate?”
–Gamecock says:
February 4, 2022 at 11:36 am
“And this ocean temperature determines global climate.”
What on earth is a “global climate?”–
We have been in Ice Age.
The Ice Age is called the Late Cenozoic Ice Age.
“Earth’s current ice age or icehouse period. Its beginning is marked by the formation of the Antarctic ice sheets”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Cenozoic_Ice_Age
It’s a icehouse global climate which has going on 34 million years, and it been coldest
time of 34 million years in about the last 2 million years.
It defined as having ice sheets at either or both poles and has a cold ocean.
A ocean which has average temperature of 5 C is a cold ocean.
Our ocean average is about 3.5 C and warmest our ocean has been in last 2 million
years has about 4 C
“More than 90 percent of the warming that has happened on Earth over the past 50 years has occurred in the ocean”
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-ocean-heat-content
But it takes long time to warm our ocean and if our ocean was about 4 C, it some like the CAWG
that climate cranks worry about. Ice free arctic, and significantly higher global air temperature.
–it some like the CAWG
that climate cranks worry about. Ice free arctic, and significantly higher global air temperature.–
it is something like what is called CAGW [catastrophic anthropogenic global warming]
that the climate cranks worry about. During summer, ice free polar sea ice in arctic, and significantly higher global air temperature.
From NIDC’s January 2022 report…
Climate models simulating the response to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions suggest that Antarctic sea ice should be decreasing. So there is a seeming contradiction between the observations and the models. One possibility is that natural variability is higher than the models indicate and that natural variability may still dominate the Antarctic sea ice trends. A new study led by R. Fogt looked at an ensemble of reconstructions of Antarctic sea ice extent since 1905 using sea level pressure, air temperatures, and indices of climate variability. This study argues that the seasonally observed positive trends since 1979 are unusual over the twentieth century, and that a shift occurred around 1960, before routine satellite observations began. This hints that there is indeed pronounced decadal scale variability in ocean and atmospheric conditions that influence Antarctic sea ice. Whether the low ice conditions of recent years represent a new decadal-scale shift remains to be seen.
https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2022/02/arctic-sea-ice-this-january-so-last-decade/
New Perspectives on the Enigma of Expanding Antarctic Sea Ice
Recent research offers new insights on Antarctic sea ice, which, despite global warming, has increased in overall extent over the past 40 years.
11 February 2022
https://eos.org/science-updates/new-perspectives-on-the-enigma-of-expanding-antarctic-sea-ice
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‘despite global warming’ – despite their belief in AGW