Why Measuring Arctic Ice Trends From 1979 Is Gross Deception

By Paul Homewood

http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/index.html

Officially, we only started monitoring Arctic sea ice extents by satellite from 1979. We know however that this is not the whole story. For instance, HH Lamb tells us:

Kukla & Kukla (1974) report that the area of snow and ice, integrated over the year across the Northern Hemisphere, was 12% more in 1973 than in 1967, when the first satellite surveys were made.

What we also know is that 1979 in particular, and the 1970’s generally, were exceptionally cold years in and around the Arctic, as the Iceland Met Office graph below of Stykkisholmur temperatures clearly shows.

http://en.vedur.is/climatology/articles/nr/1213

We find the same pattern of cycles in temperature hitting the bottom at this time all around the Arctic.

Iceland

Greenland

Canada

Alaska

Norway

Russia

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data_v2/

As HH Lamb wrote in 1982:

The cooling of the Arctic since 1950-60 has been most marked in the very same regions which experienced the strongest warming in the earlier decades of the 20thC, namely the central Arctic and northernmost parts of the two great continents remote from the world’s oceans, but also in the Norwegian-East Greenland Sea….

A greatly increased flow of the cold East Greenland Current has in several years (especially 1968 and 1969, but also 1965, 1975 and 1979) brought more Arctic sea ice to the coasts of Iceland than for fifty years. In April-May 1968 and 1969, the island was half surrounded by ice, as had not occurred since 1888.

Such sea ice years have always been dreaded in Iceland’s history because of the depression of summer temperatures and the effects on farm production….. The 1960’s also saw the abandonment of attempts at grain growing in Iceland, which had been resumed in the warmer decades of this century after a lapse of some hundreds of years…

To draw any conclusions about Arctic ice or temperatures, using data that begins at the coldest point of the cycle is utterly worthless and grossly misleading. But this is climate “science” we are talking about.