You must have looked long and hard to try to find anything that remotely supported your ideas.
Sorry, Arctic sea ice isn’t really ‘recovering’Washington post BY BRAD PLUMER September 19, 2013
Over the past few decades, the sharp decline of summer sea ice in the Arctic has been one of the clearest signs that the Earth's climate is changing rapidly.
So it's time to check in with the sea ice again now that we've reached the end of the 2013 summer melt season. Here's a chart from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) showing the extent of sea ice in the Arctic this year (red line) — that is, the area of ocean with at least 15 percent ice:
A few things jump out. The ice extent for 2013 hit a low of 5.099 million square kilometers on Sept. 13. That was the sixth-lowest minimum on record and about 23 percent below the long-term average, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
But there was still a lot more Arctic ice this year than there was in 2012, when the sea ice extent shrunk to just 3.413 million square kilometers, the lowest minimum by far since satellite measurements began. So what happened? Has the Arctic started to recover, as the Daily Mail recently suggested? Not exactly. Here's why.
Short term variation vs. long-term trends
The Met Office in Britain recently pointed out that there are all sorts of reasons why sea ice extent can bounce around from year to year:
-- temperatures naturally vary from one year to the next;
-- the amount of cloud can affect the amount of surface melting;
-- summer storms can also break up ice, which can accelerate the melting process;
-- settled conditions can be more conducive to ice forming;
-- winds may act to spread out the ice or push it together.
Those variables can help explain why sea ice didn't decline in 2013 as much as it did last year: “In 2012 we saw a record low which was likely to have been influenced by a storm which swept through the region in summer, but this year’s weather conditions appear to have been less conducive to ice loss," noted Ann Keen, a sea ice scientist at the Met Office.
Here is an article from National Geographic from 2012 when sea ice hit the record low.
Arctic Sea Ice Hits Record Low—Extreme Weather to Come?Global warming to blame for highest observed decline, scientists say.
Current Arctic sea ice (bluish white) compared with the 1979-2010 average sea ice minimum (outlined in orange).
ILLUSTRATION COURTESY SVS/NASA
Ker Than
for National Geographic News
PUBLISHED AUGUST 28, 2012, CORRECTED SEPTEMBER 10
Arctic sea ice is thawing at a historic rate, scientists say. In fact, a recent analysis of satellite data "utterly obliterates" the previous record, set in 2007.
The chief culprit? Global warming. The potential upshot? Longer and more intense extreme-weather events such as heat waves, cold spells, and droughts. (Read more about extreme weather in National Geographic magazine.)
On Monday, researchers at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center said the rate of Arctic sea ice decline is now the highest that has ever been observed for the month of August. In August of this year, the sea ice disappeared at an average rate of about 35,400 square miles (91,700 square kilometers) per day—or about twice as fast as normal, NSIDC scientists say.
Moreover, the area of Arctic sea ice around the North Pole had shrunk to 1.58 million square miles (4.1 million square kilometers)—the smallest measurement since 1979, when satellite observations began.
By comparison, said NSIDC's Julienne Stroeve, Arctic sea ice cover in the 1970s and '80s at this time of year was typically in excess of 2.7 million square miles (7 million square kilometers).
The worst news of all? The new record probably won't last long. With up to three more weeks of the melting season left, said Stroeve, the total is likely to shrink further.
"It will be below 4 million square kilometers (1.5 million square miles) before it's all said and done."
(See "Shrinking Arctic Sea Ice Linked to Snowier Winters?")
Sea Ice: Why Is This Year Different?
Scientists think the old record—1.61 million square miles (4.17 million square kilometers) on September 18, 2007—was made possible by a "perfect storm" of conditions that included an unusually persistent weather pattern known as an anticyclone, or high-pressure ridge, in the region that led to clear skies, which allowed more sunlight to reach the ice and melt it.
But weird weather doesn't seem to be a factor this time around.
"There's no persistent weather pattern that's emerged this summer," Stroeve said.
"The ice is just thinner than it used to be. So it doesn't really matter so much what the summer weather does anymore—the thin ice melts out easier during the summer melt season."
In a new study, detailed recently in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, Stroeve and her colleagues analyzed nearly two dozen computer climate models to determine the extent to which global warming is responsible for the increasing shrinkage of Arctic sea ice.
Her team determined that human activity can be blamed for some 60 percent of the observed rate of decline since 1979, with the rest due to natural climate variability.
"If you run these climate models and you don't put in the observed record of greenhouse gases, none of them show the ice declining," Stroeve said. "None of them are able to capture what's happening today without including greenhouse gases." (Learn about the greenhouse effect.)
Climate models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) also predict that Arctic summers will be completely free of sea ice in the coming decades if global warming continues unabated.
In light of the new record low, said Jennifer Francis, a climate researcher at Rutgers University's Institute of Marine and Coastal Science, "I'm definitely thinking that we're going to see [ice-free Arctic summers] earlier than most people have suggested.
"I think it could happen anytime within the next 30 years," instead of 50 years or more that some models predict, said Francis, who was not involved in the study.