The Time Has Come To Speak Of Many Things….
….of cabbages and kings, and Antarctic ice that stubbornly refuses to melt
We noted elsewhere this week news items expressing surprise at the lack of loss of Arctic sea ice.
And there’s more, because the underlying study, by Harry Stern of the University of Washington, was focused on September sea ice extent and went so far as to call it a regime shift.
As in something has changed, but they’re not sure what.
The only thing they can say for sure is it’s the opposite of what everyone predicted was going to happen.
Settled science at its finest, folks. Have complete confidence in the models and ignore that silly old ice.
The study, titled “Regime Shift in Arctic Ocean Sea-Ice Extent” was published in Geophysical Research Letters and began:
“A regime shift is an abrupt, substantial, and persistent change in the state of a system. We show that a regime shift in the September Arctic sea-ice extent (SIE) occurred in 2007.
Before 2007, September SIE was declining approximately linearly. In September 2007, SIE had its largest year-to-year drop in the entire 46-year satellite record (1979–2024).
Since 2007, September SIE has fluctuated but exhibits no long-term trend.”
September is an important month for studying Arctic sea ice, especially if you’re trying to get rid of it, since it represents the annual minimum point in ice coverage.
The melting goes on all summer, but after September the freeze begins again. So when scientists talk about declining Arctic sea ice they don’t mean the February coverage since it’s always 100 percent.
They mean how far back the melt goes each year by September.
Stern presents a graph of particular importance given the tendency of both sides to allege cherry-picking on climate data generally and Arctic ice in particular because it presents both options.
His graph shows the history of Arctic sea ice since 1979 two ways: on the left with a linear trend drawn through it and the other allowing for the “regime shift” in 2007:
The statistical model says that the right side of this chart fits the data better. It implies a trend downwards until 2007 then no trend after that year, rather than a steady trend downwards over the last four and a half decades.
So what changed in 2007? We are tempted to say that that’s the year after Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth came out with all its lurid predictions of climate disaster including the imminent disappearance of Arctic sea ice, and the gods of Norse mythology decided to borrow from those in Greek mythology and make a bit of hubris-nemesis sport with Gore.
Stern offers a more materialistic explanation with, of all things, some humility about the limits of scientific understanding including his own:
“The fact that September Arctic SIE shows no trend during 2007–2024 may at first seem hard to explain. The Earth continues to warm, and the Arctic is warming faster than the global average (IPCC, 2021).”
He surveys the various ideas out there, all of which are variations on the “never mind that silly old ice” dogma of a continuing downward trend due to ‘greenhouse gases’ superficially offset by increasing trends caused by natural cycles.
Which, if true, means the disappearance of Arctic sea ice will resume soon.
If it doesn’t, someone somewhere will have a theory to explain that outcome too, one that preserves the essential notion that we humans are overheating the planet especially the poles even if some white stuff is obscuring the true picture.
See more here climatediscussionnexus
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