BBC News – Arctic sea ice volume holds up in 2014

Posted: December 15, 2014 by oldbrew in climate, sea ice
On tour in the Arctic [credit: US Navy]

On tour in the Arctic
[credit: US Navy]

Now that the so-called ‘climate summit’ is out of the way, the BBC finds itself forced to admit that reports of the impending death of Arctic sea ice were greatly exaggerated. There’s even talk of ‘modest growth’ – shock horror!

Arctic sea ice may be more resilient than many observers recognise.

While global warming seems to have set the polar north on a path to floe-free summers, the latest data from Europe’s Cryosat mission suggests it may take a while yet to reach those conditions.

[Straw-clutching going on there?]

The spacecraft observed 7,500 cu km of ice cover in October when the Arctic traditionally starts its post-summer freeze-up.

This was only slightly down on 2013 when 8,800 cu km were recorded.

Two cool summers in a row have now allowed the pack to increase and then hold on to a good deal of its volume.

And while the ice is still much reduced compared with the 20,000 cu km that used to stick around in the Octobers of the early 1980s, there is no evidence to indicate a collapse is imminent.

Read the rest here.

Buried at the end of the report (quote):

Cryosat’s five-year October average now shows pretty stable volume – even modest growth (2014 is 12% above the five year-average). [bold added]

  1. Joe Public says:

    “By Jonathan Amos
    Science correspondent, BBC News, San Francisco”

    I what Amos is doing in SF, apart from racking up air miles in a futile attempt to encourage more melting.

  2. oldbrew says:

    Joe – maybe he was going to report on the California drought but there’s a different problem now:

    ‘Pacific storm triggers tornado, mudslides, floods in Southern California’–finance.html

    ‘The severe weather, which included thunderstorms, was spawned by a storm system dubbed a “pineapple express,” a large low-pressure area that siphoned vast amounts of moisture from the tropical Pacific near the Hawaiian islands and dumped it on the West Coast as it moved over land, the National Weather Service said.

    The same storm pummeled the Pacific Northwest and the northern half of California on Thursday with downpours and gale-force gusts that caused widespread power outages and disrupted commercial flights in San Francisco.’

  3. tchannon says:

    Or avoiding what the BBC briefly mention in passing during a main news but made clearer by others. It was highly pertinent to the election result. Abe may even have played the winter card.

    “TOKYO: Heavy snow hit large swathes of Japan on Saturday (Dec 13), the eve of a general election, fuelling speculation the ruling coalition is on course to an easy victory on low voter turnout.

    It was already snowing heavily in large areas of the country along the coast of the Sea of Japan (East Sea) on Saturday, though Tokyo remained clear and sunny. The weather agency warned of snowfall of as much as 80cm (30 inches) in central and northern regions by Sunday morning, when polls open.”

    Snow happens.

    Some time ago I took a close look at the only snow cover data . The data turned out to be in poor condition and without documentation or verification.

    Broad message, nothing going on here. Is related to Arctic sea ice and a common data problem.

    Data for the southern hemisphere too? Nope.

  4. oldbrew says:

    Report: ‘ there is no evidence to indicate a collapse is imminent’

    They are going to have to re-think their alarmist spin then. Not so long ago they were pushing this:


    That looks even sillier now than it did then, but the BBC was impressed because it fitted their bias.

  5. tchannon says:

    Here is a simple article is here from a year ago providing two plots: one of sea ice the other of hemisphere snow, both I hope putting a sensible context on claims of extremes.

    A feature of note is the change in the size of annual variation from about 2008 onwards.

    The explanation is unknown. One “obvious” possibility is the claimed by some ice thickness loss except that argument is confounded by the same effect for Antarctica where ice extent is increasing. Can’t have it both ways.

    I have another article if I can find it on Arctic sea ice data, which is from the most detailed examination I have done. I concluded the data is tortured to death and does not show a credible trend as claimed. There is a small linear change but nature does not do linear, humans do. I put this down to the unstable underlying data as technology has changed combined with serious sensing problems and attempts at fixing bad data past what is reliable.

  6. michael hart says:

    “By Jonathan Amos
    Science correspondent, BBC News, San Francisco”


    Maybe coincidentally, but probably not, the AGU fall conference is happening in San Francisco.
    Among other things you thought you couldn’t make up, is a session on Professional Ethics for Professional Climate Scientists by Michael Mann.

    Yes, you read that correctly. I expect we will see him exonerate himself a few more times for the benefit of his court case.

  7. Anything is possible says:

    The AGU must be very proud to have a “Nobel Prize winner” giving a lecture at its conference.

  8. michael hart says:

    AiP, Given the behavior of their previous chair of ethics, one Peter Gleick, even a pantomime horse would look good by comparison.

  9. oldbrew says:

    Real Science points out that Amos was peddling ‘Arctic ice-free summers by 2013’ stories not that long ago.

    At the BBC it doesn’t seem to matter how wrong you are as long as the climate propaganda is ‘on message’.

  10. Bryan says:

    Meanwhile ……

    Big Six energy group EDF could be in line with a £3.3bn windfall over the next three years on the back of a new controversial government plan to pay power companies to guarantee their help in keeping the UK’s lights on, The Guardian writes.

  11. oldbrew says:

    Bryan: that was reported on the BBC TV news, who then turned to their favourite commentator on this type of story…no surprise: Greenpeace. Nobody else got a say.

    Usual waffle about renewables, ignoring the fact they only work part-time and can never provide energy ‘on demand’. How a modern economy could ever be run on that basis is of course not explained, because it can’t be.

  12. linneamogren says:

    We also see ice increase in the Antarctic which gained an average of 7,300 square miles (18,900 sq km) after a loss of 53,900 square kilometers during the 70s.

    Again, this vacillation is very natural and has occurred time and time again throughout geological time. I made this point during a debate with a devoted AGW individual and his response is very informative. He did admit to natural causes of climate change in the distant past, but insists humans must be the cause of climate change today. They don’t want to look at evidence over hundreds of millions of years, only at snapshots that barricade their hypothesis from any skepticism.

    “Long before the Industrial Revolution, or even before the evolution of man, dramatic climate changes occurred, instigated by natural phenomena like orbital forcing a.k.a. Milankovitch cycles (linked with ice ages), changes in sunspot activity such as the Maunder minimum (often cited as a primary causal factor for the Little Ice Age), volcanic outgassing, sublimation of methane hydrates along continental shelves, the drift of tectonic plates influencing the flow of the so-called “oceanic conveyor belt,” giant meteorite impacts creating worldwide clouds of debris that block out most of the sunlight for extended periods of time (like the meteorite that created the Chicxulub crater in Mexico, implicated in the extinction of most dinosaur species), etc. Some AGW deniers infer from all this that since vast, cataclysmic natural causes like these have been driving climate change for hundreds of millions of years, that poor, puny, pitiful human beings couldn’t possibly contribute to, let alone be the primary cause of, climate change today.

    Sounds pretty reasonable, right? earlier in this thread, in a different recent thread, have made similar arguments, though more succinctly. But I didn’t find them any more convincing than I would find these, which follow the same “nature did it first, so man can’t” inductive reasoning:

    Long before the evolution of man, dramatic and widespread forest fires occurred, instigated by natural phenomena like droughts, lightning strikes, lava flows and meteorite impacts, so poor, puny, pitiful human beings couldn’t possibly contribute to, let alone be a primary cause of, any forest fires today.

    Long before man, the courses of mighty rivers were obstructed or averted by natural phenomena like avalanches, mud slides, earthquakes, lava flows and even dams built by giant prehistoric relatives of modern beavers, so poor, puny, pitiful human beings couldn’t possibly build dams to obstruct or avert rivers today.

    Long before man, many animal species such as birds, bats, insects and dinosaurs could fly through the air at high speeds and altitudes, so poor, puny, pitiful human beings couldn’t possibly do so today.

    The trouble is, human beings have evolved and learned how to do all sorts of things that only nature could do before we came along, and in many cases, we have outdone our natural predecessors: we can start (and extinguish) forest fires, build colossal dams, and fly in jet planes and rockets faster and higher than any bird. No other species has split the atom, walked on the moon, or communicated at the speed of light with probes they have sent to planets millions of miles away… just us poor, puny, pitiful humans! So I’m not buying the whole “climate change was around long before man, so man has nothing to do with it” argument.”

  13. tallbloke says:

    Linnea: Good comment!
    I come at it from a several different perspectives, that I hope are scientific.

    1) Empirical
    Whatever is going on with climate change, it’s obviously a mixture of ‘natural’ and ‘manmade’ – the question is how much of each?
    So I’m trying to work out what the natural bits that have been ignored by IPCC are. The temperature record isn’t going to to tell us anything very conclusive yet, because it is uncertain, and the magnitudes of natural oscillations are difficult to pin down too. But at least we might see the shape of the problem if we can combine the natural oscillations and get something that fits the temperature record well without too much fudging like the IPCC has done with aerosols and inlated sensitivity estimates.

    Here’s one of my efforts:

    The 0.2C from CO2 might be ‘adjustments’ to the temperature record, who knows?

    Anyway, we’ve got a nice model of longer term changes to the 10Be record Rick Salvador has worked out, so that might help too:

    Pretty good eh? 4000 years of TSI reconstruction nailed with 3 planetary orbital periods.

    But apart from this curve fitting stuff, there are a couple of other considerations.

    2) Scale

    1) You could stand the whole human population on the Isle of Man
    2) Bacteria outweigh us by many orders of magnitude. They and the plants control the atmospheric composition
    3) The carbon cycle is huge compared to our input to it
    4) The argument that the extra CO2 in the air since 1950 is demonstrably all ours is nonsense

    3) Bad Theory
    The greenhouse theory is very dodgy – we spend many happy hours picking holes in it:

    1) CO2 changes lag behind Temperature changes at all timescales
    2) Longwave radiation doesn’t heat oceans
    3) Convection and latent heat transport is not well integrated into climate models

  14. oldbrew says:

    What caused the dips?


  15. tallbloke says:

    Odd looking plot. Where’s that from?

    [reply] Here:

  16. linneamogren says:


    Love the plots! Thank you so much for posting them. I showed some of your work to my astronomy professor and he was very impressed. Now, other classes some professors are very hostile to non human cause, but interestingly they are not scientists.

    I understand humans can have an impact on environmental issues such as forest fires, building hydro dams and so on. But the underlined theme of AGW concludes the extra energy ( c02) that humans have belched into the atmosphere has caused deleterious outcomes from increased temperatures to catastrophic typhoons and droughts.

    Now, studies have shown the effects of c02 become negated once temps have risen two degrees. Still, there is little empirical evidence that increased energy (c02 & longwave radiation) within the atmosphere could globally cause temps to rise. Again, the 2nd law of thermodynamics does not enforce the hypothesis that a radiative thermal equilibrium can change using its own energy regardless how much c02 is infused into the atmosphere.

    I have stated here many times Venus, where we calculate a 0.002% vapor count and an atmosphere composed of 97% c02 yet the AGW side claim evidence of a runaway greenhouse effect. Only the vapor count pretty much debunks the AGW hypothesis from the start because even Carl Sagan once believed a high vapor count must have existed for temps to melt lead at the surface for the greenhouse theory to exist. Yet, there is all but no vapor. But there is a massive atmospheric mass.

    Temps on earth increase around 80C once you move from 20-100kPa. If one was to place the Venusian atmospheric mass on earth at 9,000Kpa earth all but becomes the surface of Venus, regardless of its composition of 97% c02.

    20C + ln(9000/(100-20)) 80C = 400C Looks like co2 had no effect. Now move earth to the orbit of Venus and temps increase even closer to its 467C surface temperature.

    I think the answers to causation of warming and cooling periods ( which may never be completely known ) exist more in the cosmos than our exhaust pipes.

  17. linneamogren says:

    ” Only the vapor count pretty much debunks the AGW hypothesis from the start ”

    My apologies I should have wrote “greenhouse effect” in regards to Venus. Unless some warmers are living up there : )

  18. tallbloke says:

    Linnea: I just tweeted your final sentence. 🙂

  19. oldbrew says:

    ‘Yet, there is all but no vapor. But there is a massive atmospheric mass.’

    Linnea: evaporation. This site (I don’t agree with a lot of their claims) argues that the deuterium/hydrogen level on Venus shows what happened.

    ‘Venus lost, over the course of 1 to 2 billion years, the water that it had gained from degassing over 500 million years. The ratio deuterium/hydrogen proves this fact. It is 120 times as high as on Earth. Deuterium, hydrogen’s heavier isotope, is lost to space less quickly, and thus is more concentrated with respect to hydrogen.’

  20. linneamogren says:

    Roger- Tack så mycket : )

  21. tallbloke says:

    Linnea- Du är mycket välkommen

  22. linneamogren says:


    Yes, I understand that hypothesis regarding water once believed to have existed on Venus. Again, it’s an assumption more than anything else. Overall when calculating the Venusian atmospheric mass c02 becomes all but irrelevant since location to the Sun and atmospheric mass has doomed Venus to lethal temperatures.

    The hypothesis goes that water was never able to liquefy, thus remained in the Venusian atmosphere. This in turn caused warming which caused encapsulated C02 to be released and through amplification ignited a runaway greenhouse effect.

    Why it is true that Venus has a D/H ratio many times that of Earth, but so does all interstellar water-ice. One important reason we see a large D/H ratio in the Venusian atmosphere is due to H being a much lighter element than deuterium which allows H to escape at a velocity of 10.4 km/sec into the solar system or 2×10^24 H atoms blasted from the atmosphere every second.

    Deuterium is found in H, but still this does not prove water ever existed on Venus. One in every 10,000 H atoms are D and every H20 molecule has 2 H isotopes. So, every 5000 H20 molecules will have a D atom. Again, water or no water Venus is no hotter or cooler than it should be due to its atmospheric mass and location to the Sun.

    Mercury’s atmosphere is 22% H and an oxygen level of 42%, yet there’s no water outside of some possible ice trapped just under the polar caps which accounts for its very small vapor count. Venus also has a very cold layer in its upper atmosphere which causes c02 to freeze out as ice. 125km above the Venusian surface we see temps at -175K. This logically explains the Venusian vapor count as well. But concerning Mercury, it’s believed most of the planets H comes from the Sun which has an escape velocity of 1.3814×10^6mph infusing H into Mercury which is only 35,980,000 miles from the Sun and Venus only 67,240,000 miles. Venus has a much lower H count in its atmosphere 0.001 but logically could also be influenced by the Sun which is 71% H.

    The radiating temp of Venus is 1.176 times of our own. Which means at any pressure within the range of our atmosphere the Venusian temp will be 1.176 times the corresponding atmosphere here. 1.165+/-0.015=0.991×1.176. So both atmospheres are being warmed the same way. That being direct IR radiation from above not the surface.

    When comparing atmospheric temps at equal pressures in the Venusian and Earth’s atmospheres the Venusian temp will always be 17% higher. Again, only atmospheric mass and location to our Sun determines the thermal equilibrium.

    We took the long way home in regards to ice increasing on our poles, but it goes to show how each period of warming and cooling is not effected by anthropogenic cause, rather its atmospheric, oceanic and cosmological.

  23. tallbloke says:


    This sounds a lot like Harry Dale-Huffman’s argument, but I think there’s a problem. On Earth, enough shortwave capable of heating the surface gets through water to a depth sufficient to heat the dark mud on lake beds. You can see the convection coming up through the water on calm days with a clear sky and high Sun. Not much direct Sunlight hits Venus’ surface. The fact that the vertical temperature profiles are similar tells you how efficient convection is at moving energy around in dense atmospheres I think.

  24. oldbrew says:

    Global sea ice extent is on the up compared to the 1990s.

    See also:

  25. linneamogren says:


    75% of the suns energy is reflected in the Venusian atmosphere due to its 100% cloud cover. So more shortwave radiation reaches earths surface but our atmospheres are essentially warmed the same. Doctor Postma has also come to that conclusion. On earth our atmosphere not only warms our surface but it actually cools it as well through adiabatic temp distribution. So, the Venusian atmosphere does an excellent job with convection as you pointed out. Moving energy is not only efficient on Venus its very effective on earth as I pointed out with adiabatic distribution. A very hot surface like beach sand or concrete is cool and refreshing just above the surface so the atmosphere is actually heating and cooling the surface simultaneously.

  26. oldbrew says:

    Alarmists in retreat, not sea ice says NTZ:

    Some have even discovered ‘internal variability’ even if they can’t explain it.

  27. tallbloke says:


    You need to be careful with language here. I think Jo Postma is wrong about a number of things, though his formulations change so I’m not sure which version you’ve read.

    On Earth, the atmosphere is thought to absorb about 20% of the incoming solar radiation, 30% is thought to be reflected by cloud albedo, and the rest makes it to the ground and penetrates the ocean. Let’s deal with albedo first.

    There is theory on cloud microphysics, and absorptivity was theoretically calculated. But when NASA flew aircraft above and below the cloud deck taking simultaneous measurements, they found the cloud was absorbing around 20W/m^2 more than theory said it should. So much for cloud microphysics. This means that less than 30% of the Sun’s energy is being reflected back into space by Earth’s clouds. Translate this to Venus. If considerably more Solar energy is being absorbed than theory indicates, and that energy is forward propagated, then more solar energy will reach the ground than the theory says.

    The solar energy absorbed in the Earth’s atmosphere is mostly absorbed by water vapour, which is lighter than air. When it absorbs energy, it gets hotter, and even lighter as it expands, and rises buoyantly. It is not heading down to heat the ground.

    The Solar energy that reaches the ground and penetrates the ocean directly heats these components. To confirm this put two paving slabs in the garden on a sunny day. Cover one with a parasol. Measure concrete surface temperatures and air temperatures. You will find the air temperature is about the same above both, but the Sun exposed slab gets hot, and the shaded slab doesn’t. QED.

    The ocean absorbs solar energy during the day and releases it at night. SST varies very little overnight, and the air temperature varies a lot more. It’s also warmer at night on the coast than inland, because water has a higher heat capacity than rock, and the warmer surface water losing energy to the air is replaced by warmer water from beneath once it cools and sinks. The ocean warms the air, not the other way round. The top two meters of the ocean has as much thermal capacity as the entire atmosphere above it. The tail does not wag the dog.

    Earth and Venus are different, but the lapse rates are similar. This is because in both cases the atmospheres are working hard to get rid of energy back to space, and the way that all works means the dry lapse rate will always approximate to -g/Cp.

    Just why that should be is one of the big questions we’ve been working on at the talkshop.

  28. linneamogren says:


    I see your point very clearly. Our atmosphere is warmed by the capacity of our oceans to hold energy and when released warms our atmosphere. Rather than the atmosphere warming the surface. Which means oceans are able to warm our air more than shortwave radiation. So, cooler air over a hot surface is an atmosphere regulating energy. Logically since both atmospheres are working overtime to remove energy, extra energy such as c02 is also being regulated and absorbed.

    Thank you for pointing that out, so much of what one reads is the opposite.

  29. linneamogren says:


    I asked my astronomy professor today about direct IR heating an atmosphere and he also stated an atmosphere is warmed by thermal expansion from oceans which also causes sea levels to rise.

  30. Paul Vaughan says:

    The ocean has orders of magnitude greater heat capacity but the atmosphere has orders of magnitude greater kinetic energy. The coupling of ocean and atmosphere isn’t through a surface that’s sitting still. Wind & coupling strength are a function of gradients.

  31. tallbloke says:

    Paul: the atmosphere has orders of magnitude greater kinetic energy

    You think? I don’t doubt it has a higher velocity, but suspect it has a lot less momentum/inertia.

  32. oldbrew says:

    linneamogren says: ‘Why it is true that Venus has a D/H ratio many times that of Earth, but so does all interstellar water-ice.’

    Good point, supported by a recent result:

    ‘the Rosetta mission revealed that the water on its frozen target, comet 67P, actually weighs more than water here on Earth. That’s because water is a mix of H2O and a heavier version in which one of the hydrogen atoms is replaced by its heavier cousin, deuterium. Comet 67P’s water has more deuterium in it than earthly water does, which has scientists leaning against a hypothesis that our water originally came from comets.’

    Perhaps the question should be: why does Earth seem to be the odd one out?

  33. linneamogren says:


    Great find that article thank you! They put lots of hopes in this mission that comets are the source of water and life arriving to earth. If it seems water did not arrive by comets, how much more likely life did?

    As for the melting and culmination of ice at the poles, the thermohaline ocean circulation moves warmer water to the poles. During periods of increased Sun activity we would see oceans become warmer and when these waters are driven to the poles this could also effect ice melts. During periods of less solar activity (or increased cloud albedo) less warm energy is moved to the poles and we would see increased ice. Just my hypothesis. Winds also guide the warmer waters to the poles combined with the thermohaline circulation. So, we see the atmosphere working with oceanic regulation.

    Since we were using Venus as an example of natural and cosmological guides for temperatures, the Venusian atmosphere does an excellent job at distributing an almost even surface temperature even days on Venus last 243 earth days. This means the other half of the planet is in darkness for the same period of time, but still sees almost even temps due to its thick atmosphere caused by the immense energy built during the one Venusian day.

  34. linneamogren says:

    Another important point in regards to glacial melts, they since discovered ( or finally admitted to ) volcanic activity under glacial areas that heat is transferred much further than they once thought.

  35. Paul Vaughan says:

    Paul Vaughan (December 18, 2014 at 5:50 pm) wrote:

    tallbloke (December 18, 2014 at 6:11 pm) questioned kinetic energy by referring to momentum/inertia:

    The primary driver of ocean currents is wind.

  36. oldbrew says:

    Re Venus: it’s also not hard to imagine that an atmosphere with over 97% radiative gas can distribute incoming solar radiation very efficiently, again making the ‘uniform’ day/night temperature easier to understand.

    From an Antarctic volcano report:

    “The volcano will create millions of gallons of water beneath the ice – many lakes full. This water will rush beneath the ice towards the sea and feed into the hydrological catchment of the MacAyeal Ice Stream, one of several major ice streams draining ice from Marie Byrd Land into the Ross Ice Shelf,” explained study co-author Prof Doug Wiens, also from Washington University in St. Louis.

    [bold added]

  37. Paul Vaughan says:
    property 	oceans	air	description
    heat capacity	1600	1	Very large volume times high specific heat capacity
    mass	400	1	Atmosphere only equates to 10m depth
    momentum	4	1	Speed times mass
    kinetic energy 	0.04	1	Ocean currents are slow and superficial. Winds are fast.

    “The complexity of the climate system has been described by many people including such great scientists as Einstein and Von Neumann, pointing out that the ocean drives the atmosphere, and the atmosphere drives the ocean, and that the interactions occur on all time and space scales, with nonlinearities and thresholds and that the representation of all these interactions, are almost beyond comprehension. The simplicity is that nature knows all the rules, and knows all the boundary conditions and knows where the mountain ranges are, deep ocean ridges and trenches, and the rest of the geography, and nature’s answer to that question is this average picture of winds (wind field). When you think of it in a holistic sense, you can think, if whatever is forcing this system, if it changes in magnitude, you can expect that the whole pattern will wax and wane in unison. And that is exactly what the observed record is showing as here with the wind field.
    […] the most popular signals like ENSO, AMO, PDO […] they do not make it. But what Fletcher discovered was the consistency and the enormous change in the wind field (wind speed) […]
    Joe Fletcher pays much importance to the Tropical Warm Pool, and how it works as the greatest climate phenomenon on Earth.
    The sea wind is indeed a universal global signal because all oceans follow the same pattern and the same deviations for over 150 years. The wind signal is large, because the 150 year swing [see box below] of 25-30% is equal to a swing in solar forcing of 30-50W/m2, whereas the world is in panic about 3W/m2 in a century (IPCC)!
    Protagonists of AGW would say that these graphs are a sign of global warming, ignoring that winds have followed the same pattern and that evaporation is proportional to wind speed.”

    [bold added]

    TB: The resistance to “barycenter” ideas pales in comparison to the more visceral — even terrified — resistance we’re going to see on the wind front. I suspect they’ll go to any lengths to stop the real wind message from getting out. This is a very serious matter. Bon Courage….

  38. tallbloke says:

    Paul: thanks. I should have recalled the title of Hans Jelbring’s excellent PhD thesis: Wind Controlled Climate.