If the hottest year ever can’t precipitate ‘ice-free’ conditions in September, what’s it going to take? Arctic sea ice failed to nose-dive again this year, undoubtedly disappointing expects who have been anticipating a ‘death-spiral’ decline for ages. Arctic sea ice hit its seasonal low sometime around mid-September this year and although the precise value hasn’t been published, the average September ice coverage will likely be about 4.2 mkm2 once it gets announced in early October.
This means we have now had 17 years of a near-zero trend for September sea ice, extending the nearly-flat trend NSIDC sea ice experts acknowledged four years ago. This surely busts a huge hole in the prevailing concept that more atmospheric CO2 causes less summer sea ice. Note that CO2 levels measured in August 2023 were 419.7 parts per million (ppm), compared to 382.2 in August 2007, a rise of 37.5ppm with no corresponding decline in summer sea ice (and vs. 314.2 ppm in 1960). Measured in metric tons, CO2 emissions due to fossil fuels rose from 31.1 billion in 2007 to 37.1 billion in 2021 (last year of data), again with no corresponding decline in summer sea ice.
by P. Gosselin, Sep 27, 2023 in ClimatChangeDispatch
On September 24th, 2023, Kasha Patel, a writer for The Washington Post (WaPo) created a story that is likely in the top 10 most false and egregious climate scare stories ever published.
In this case, peer review at Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) failed to catch and correct the most basic abuse of the definition of a “heat wave.”
The leading paragraph of the WaPo story said:
In March 2022, temperatures near the eastern coast of Antarctica spiked 70 degrees Fahrenheit (39 degrees Celsius) above normal — making it the most intense recorded heat wave to occur anywhere on Earth, according to a recent study.
At the time, researchers on-site were wearing shorts and some even removed their shirts to bask in the (relative) warmth. Scientists elsewhere said such a high in that region of the world was unthinkable.
WaPo also provided a normal temperature, for reference with some “unbelievability” from the lead author of the paper.
Temperatures in March, marking a change into autumn on the continent, are typically around minus -54 degrees Celsius on the east coast near…Dome C. On March 18, 2022, temperatures peaked to minus -10 degrees Celsius. That’s warmer than even the hottest temperature recorded during the summer months in that region — “that in itself is pretty unbelievable,” said Blanchard-Wrigglesworth, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington.
First, it is important to point out that the so-called “heat wave” really wasn’t warm at all; the shorts and shirt removal were completely for show, rather than science.
Since most people in the United States use the Fahrenheit temperature scale, which isn’t mentioned at all in the WaPo article citing the actual high temperature recorded, it was easy for reporter Kasha Patel to sneak by the idea that it was actually warm at the time.
-10 Celsius is actually 14 degrees Fahrenheit – which isn’t warm, much less a “heat wave” by any definition. Patel can’t be forgiven for not mentioning this in the article because anyone can get the conversion simply by typing it into Google, like this example.
But that isn’t the worst journalistic violation Patel makes.
by P. Gosselin, Sep 17, 2023 in ClimateChangeDispatch
Sixteen Years Of No Decline
Arctic summer minimum sea ice extent refuses to drop further, surprising and frustrating the alarmist media.
German research vessel Polarstern of the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) is currently underway again in the Arctic where a decrease in sea ice had been expected there, or, probably more accurately said, hoped for. [emphasis, links added]
In view of the extreme summer, the question arose in advance: Will the Arctic also see a new negative record in melting ice this year? This time, the Arctic has been spared.
AWI director and expedition leader Antje Boetius tells Tagesschau that an unusual weather phenomenon prevented a record melt of Arctic sea ice this summer.
According to Boetius, a sequence of low-pressure systems has led to an entirely different ice movement. The so-called transpolar drift, which describes the drifting of ice along certain routes, took a different course this year, she said.
Ice from the Siberian region has been held together and compressed instead of drifting out and melting. For the AWI director, this shows that weather phenomena determine the development of sea ice, and that forecasting is more difficult than ever.
The Arctic, with its sea ice and life, has been lucky once again, says the biologist. But things could go the other way. “If we are unlucky, if weather phenomena play unfavorably, we can also be affected by large ice-free parts much sooner than expected,” Boetius adds.”
We notice that when the opposite happens, e.g. heat, storms, or more ice melt, then it’s all because of climate warming. But when it goes the other way, then it’s weather!
La géologie, une science plus que passionnante … et diverse
