10/02/2013

After predictions that Arctic Sea Ice would disappear by 2013, significant increase in ice cover

Given that the world is still relatively cold compared to the average temperature over the last 1 billion years, I would expect that global temperatures would tend to rise.  Still it is interesting to see how wrong the predictions about Arctic Sea ice have been.  From Fox News:
About a million more square miles of ocean are covered in ice in 2013 than in 2012, a whopping 60 percent increase -- and a dramatic deviation from predictions of an "ice-free Arctic in 2013,"the Daily Mail noted
Arctic sea ice averaged 2.35 million square miles in August 2013, as compared to the low point of 1.32 million square miles recorded on Sept. 16, 2012, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. A chart published Sept. 8 by NSIDC shows the dramatic rise this year, putting total ice cover within two standard deviations of the 30-year average. 
Noting the year over year surge, one scientist even argued that "global cooling" was here.
"We are already in a cooling trend, which I think will continue for the next 15 years at least. There is no doubt the warming of the 1980s and 1990s has stopped,” Anastasios Tsonis of the University of Wisconsin told London’s Mail on Sunday. . . .  
"[An ice-free Arctic is] definitely coming, and coming sooner than we previously expected,“ Walt Meier, a glaciologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md, told LiveScience last month. “We're looking at when as opposed to if.” . . .



At about 1:21 into this clip, Michael Mann claims:
We are seeing that in the Arctic right now.  We are seeing that Arctic Sea ice is retreating at a schedule that is decades ahead of what the models were projecting.  We are actually seeing changes unfold faster than what we were expecting. . . .
Mann is basically setting up straw men in his whole presentation, but I am focusing on one here because of the recent news on the Arctic Sea ice sheet. 

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