Polar Sea Ice: Not Nearly as Bad as You’ve Heard

Polar Sea Ice: Not Nearly as Bad as You’ve Heard

Antarctic ice has been expanding for over 30 years, Greenland snow cover has expanded by 1000 Manhattans since 1974

Polar Sea Ice: Not Nearly as Bad as You’ve Heard

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Which of the following headlines have you read or heard about? Which would you believe?
“Polar sea ice could set another record this year”
“Petermann Glacier in Greenland breaks off iceberg twice the size of Manhattan”
“Greenland snow cover has expanded by 1000 Manhattans since 1974”
“Antarctic ice has been expanding for over 30 years”
“Antarctic ice: is it going to take over the planet”
I suspect you’ve heard of the first two, but most probably not the latter three. Taking all the world’s sea ice together, as opposed to focusing exclusively in the Arctic—the situation regarding sea ice and snow cover is far less gloomy than most media outlets present.
Pictures of huge chunks of ice plopping into the ocean around Antarctica get great headlines such as ‘Seven times the size of Manhattan.’ Watch Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, and you will be treated to many of the familiar images of colossal chunks of ice calving off into the sea from the edge of the Antarctic. Scary to be sure, but every time you hear that X number of gigatonnes (or cubic kilometers) of ice are melting per year in Greenland or Antarctica you should realize that one gigatonne of ice rises the sea level by less than 2.8 microns (a micron is a millionth of a meter). (1)
Gigatonnes and cubic kilometers impress people who do not really understand what these terms really mean. The piece of the ice shelf that broke off in March 2008 was reported to be 160 square miles (about 400 square kilometers). It was about 650 feet (200 meters) thick with a total volume of about 80 km3. Over the course of time it took this volume of ice to move from land to the sea it contributed to a sea level rise of 0.009 inches. That’s not very much considering that it took many years. In order for the Antarctic peninsula to contribute 12 inches to the sea level in 100 years, it would have to drop 1,080- km3 of ice into the ocean EVERY SINGLE YEAR FOR 100 YEARS (more really, because the density of the ice is less than the density of water). (2)
Did you know that the Antarctic ice pack is increasing? The rate is half a million km2 per year. Jokingly, reports Investors’ Business Daily, if this alarming trend continues, the planet will be completely covered with Antarctic ice in 1,000 years. They add, “We don’t expect Earth to be fully covered with Antarctic ice in 1,000 years. But it’s a fine, though maybe somewhat snarky response to Al Gore, who in his movie An Inconvenient Truth, said that sea level will rise 20 feet due to global warming. The point is, a lot of data look extreme if their trend lines are projected to go unbroken for decades and centuries, and no room is allowed for reversals.” (3)

What About Greenland and the Arctic?

Pierre Gosselin asks? Greenland is melting? Where? Data show there is about 80,000 square kilometers more snow cover today than in 1974. That’s the same as almost 1,000 Manhattans. When a piece of glacier the size of Manhattan breaks off and floats into the ocean, the media freak out about it. But when Greenland snow cover jumps a whopping 80,000 sq km, we don’t hear a peep. Northern Hemisphere snow cover is now the 4th highest in 35 years. (4)
So just how bad was the Arctic ice melt in 2012? Listening to the alarmists you’d think the world’s ice supply was rapidly dwindling. When you do the calculations, 0.006% more of the world’s ice melted in 2012. At this rate it’ll take 166 years to see a 1% reduction. This is like taking a glass of ice from a frozen swimming pool. The number is so small that it is outside the statistical margins of certainty. Scientists are not even sure how thick the ice is at many locations. (5)
That is why it’s just plain stupid to hysterically focus on a thin film of ice at one pole. It’s utter nonsense. Ice-free Arctics happened in the past and are nothing new.
Then in January of this year, Arctic sea ice extent was, for all practical purposes, back to normal. This return to normal means only one thing. The ‘dramatic melt’ of August 2012 had to have been completely reversed by an equally ‘dramatic refreeze’ this winter. Unfortunately, there weren’t many news stories about this in the media. Ice and many other cliamte developments are only one-way dramatic events for the warmists, i.e., only when it melts, and not when it freezes, notes Pierre Gosselin. (6)
The Arctic blew away the previous record for ice gain this winter. This is only the third winter in history when more than 10 million km2 of new ice has formed. (7)
In addition, recent reports show that Arctic temperatures are not unusual, unnatural, or unprecedented. One recent paper reconstructs Arctic temperatures from shells collected from Iceland and demonstrates that temperatures have been warmer than the present over much of the past 500 years. (8). Another paper reconstructs Arctic temperatures in Kamchatka, USSR, over the past 4,500 years and finds the highest reconstructed temperatures were about 3.8 C warmer than modern temperatures. The data also show that temperatures during the Medieval and Roman warming periods were about 1 to 2 C above modern temperatures of around 13 C.(9) These papers add to many other peer-reviewed studies demonstrating that there is nothing unusual regarding modern Arctic temperatures.

References

1. “Written to deceive?”, junkscience.com/blog, April 23, 2008
2. “The collapse of the Wilkins ice shelf,” climatesanity.wordpress.com, April 1, 2008
3. “Antarctic ice: is it going to take over the planet?”, Investors’ Business Daily, February 2, 2013
4. P. Gosselin, “Greenland snow cover has expanded by 1,000 Manhattans since 1974…clear rising trend!”, notrickszone.com, January 7, 2013
5. P. Gosselin, “Oh no! Six thousandths of one percent (0.006%) more of the world’s ice melted this summer1”, notrickszone.com, August 27, 2012
6. P. Gosselin, “Arctic sea ice back to normal! Dramatic record freeze wipes out ‘dramatic’ melt of August,” notrickszone.com, January 16, 2013
7. Steven Goddard, “Most Arctic ice gain ever recorded,” stevengoddard.wordpress.com, February 12, 2013
8. Gerritt Lohmann and Bernd R. Schone, “Climate signatures on decadal to interdecadal time scales as obtained from mollusk shells (Artica islandica) from Iceland,” Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, 373, 152, March 2013
9. Larissa Nazarova et al., “Late Holocene climate and environmental changes in Kamchatka inferred from the subfossil chiromid record,” Quarternary Science Reviews