Silly Season Here: Ice Loss Denial, Right on Time September 4, 2014

Right on time, the David Rose of the Daily Mail has published his annual “Arctic Ice is Growing” article – which we can expect to see every year that the Arctic sea ice does not set a new record low. 2012, of course, was a stunning record low following 30+ years of steady decline in both area and volume of arctic sea ice, and sea ice globally. 2013, and 2014, it appears, will not set new low records – a pattern much like the dead cat bounce we saw after 2007’s crushing record low year.

Last year’s bogus ice post made the rounds of the usual suspects before humiliating errors and omissions were highlighted by the science community. Being caught out in error and misinformation, is, of course, of no consequence to the denialist cadre – once their bogus memes go viral, they’ve done their job, since few of their target audience has the wit or inclination to double check the claims.

Fortunately, Carbon Brief has some remedial information:

The Mail on Sunday reports that Arctic summer ice is on the increase, disproving the “myth of Arctic meltdown”. But the article, by journalist David Rose, acknowledges a declining trend in summer Arctic sea-ice. And scientists tell us the increase in ice is natural year-to-year variation. Climate change is warming the Arctic, and scientists think it will make the region ice-free in summer at some point this century – points that despite the hyperbolic headline, the Mail on Sunday notes. Ice gain or loss? The Mail article reveals “how melt has slowed over ten years” using the graph below, showing Arctic sea ice extent from 2004 to 2014. However, taking a longer view shows a different picture. The graph below is from the NSIDC (National Snow and Ice Data Centre) at the University of Colorado, and plots data for the past 60 years. The pink line shows the average area of Arctic sea-ice each year, compared with the long-term average – what’s called the sea ice ‘anomaly’. While the amount of ice increases and decreases from year to year, the long term trend is clearly downwards. In 2014, the amount of sea ice remains well below average. The map (shown below) compares Arctic sea-ice extent from last weekend (30th August 2014) with the 30-year average, shown by the orange line. The latest IPCC report, which offers the most considered scientific view of how the climate is changing, states that “Arctic sea ice summer extent has decreased by between 9.4 to 13.6% per decade.” The Mail article also suggests that Arctic sea-ice is thickening. It may be the case that the ice is thicker this year than last, but again, looking at more than a couple of years suggests that overall the volume of sea-ice is decreasing.

More at Carbon Brief.

Representing the grown-ups POV, there’s also this tweet from genius and Tesla Motors billionaire Elon Musk in response to the disinformation.

..which linked to this further info from Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plaite:

In 2012, a mix of unusual causes created conditions where the minimum reached a record low, far below normal. The next year, in 2013, the ice didn’t reach quite so low a minimum extent, and this year looks very much the same as 2013. But saying the ice is “recovering” is, to put it delicately, what comes out the south end of a north-facing bull. You can’t compare two years with a record low the year before that was due to unusual circumstances; you have to look at the average over time. Of course, if you do, your claims that global warming isn’t real melt away. I’m happy to provide that information. Here’s the Arctic ice extent graphed by the National Snow and Ice Data Center: The black line is the average for 1981–2010. The gray region shows the ±2 standard deviation extent for that average; statistically speaking it’s an expected range of extent (it’s actually more subtle than that, but that’s enough to understand what’s going on here). The dashed line shows the 2012 ice extent, and is clearly very low, well outside the expected range. The brown line is 2013, and the light green line is this year, 2014, up to late August. Notice 2014 follows the year before pretty closely. Note also they are well below average, near the bottom of the expected range. If you look at any recent year’s ice it’s below average; you have to go back to 2001 to find an ice extent near the average. So the claim that the ice is “recovering” is made based on the wrong comparison. Compare the past two years to the overall trend and they fit in pretty well with overall decline. Also, that “recovery” claim cannot be made with only two data points. Two years is not a trend. There have been many times ice has gone up over a year or two in the Arctic, only to drop once again over the long run.

Readers may remember that last year’s “ice is growing” post in The Mail drew a well deserved ration of corrections and condemnations, including this response from the University of Leeds Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy:

The Mail on Sunday’ is facing humiliation after two articles published earlier this month which attacked the evidence for climate change were revealed this week to contain embarrassing errors. The two stories on Arctic sea ice and the forthcoming report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were written by David Rose, who has been assigned by the newspaper’s editor and deputy editor, Geordie Greig and Gerard Greaves, to undermine the science of climate change through a campaign called ‘The Great Green Con’. But the campaign is now is disarray as the newspaper has been forced to admit that Rose’s Arctic ice story was based on a typographic error, and the other article contained major mistakes and misrepresentations. On 8 September, ‘The Mail on Sunday’ published an article by Rose on page 13 under the headline ‘Record return of arctic ice cap as top scientists warn of global COOLING’. The opening paragraph stated: “A chilly Arctic summer has left nearly a million more square miles of ocean covered with ice than at the same time last year – an increase of 60 per cent”. The story was quickly copied by other newspapers in the UK, such as ‘The Daily Telegraph’ as well as other media abroad. Meanwhile, climate change ‘sceptics’, such as Lord Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation, eagerly reproduced the article on their blogs and websites as evidence that global warming has stopped. Rose told me by e-mail that the source of his claim that the ice extent was 60 per cent higher this year was an announcement posted on the website of the United States National Snow and Ice Data Center on 4 September: “August 2013 ice extent was 2.38 million square kilometers (919,000 square miles) above the record low August extent in 2012. The monthly trend is –10.6% per decade relative to the 1981 to 2010 average.” Elsewhere on its website, the NSIDC indicated that the average Arctic sea ice extent in August 2012 was a record low figure of 1.82 million square miles. This should have led Rose to claim that the Arctic sea ice was 50.5 per cent higher last month, but further faulty reasoning led him to conclude the difference was 60 per cent. However, the NSIDC confirmed to me yesterday that the main figure used by Rose for his article was mistyped and that the mistake was corrected on 10 September, showing that Arctic sea extent in August 2013 was only 29 per cent higher than was recorded for the same month last year. In an email to me yesterday, Natasha Vizcarra, the media liaison for NSIDC, stated: “When we published the report, it contained a typographical error in the difference between the August 2013 monthly ice extent and the record low August extent in 2012 (and the corresponding square mile conversions). If you subtract the August 2012 extent of 4.72 million square kilometres from the August 2013 extent of 6.09 million square kilometers, you get 1.38 million square kilometers, not 2.38 million square kilometers. Our readers noticed the error and we corrected the typographical error on September 10. There are no plans to make a statement on the change because it was not an error in the data.” Although Rose obviously did not realise that the NSIDC figures were in error, other parts of his article were deliberately misleading. For instance, he failed to point out that the August 2013 average sea ice extent was the sixth lowest figure for that month since satellite records began in 1979, and lower than any August before 2007. And nowhere did he admit that the August 2013 average extent of 2.35 million square miles was almost 15 per cent less than the 30-year average between 1981 and 2010 of 2.75 million square miles, and consistent with the measured rate of decline of more than 10 per cent per decade. So even allowing for his unfortunate blunder in using a typographic error as the main source for his story, it was completely misleading for Rose to create the impression that the Arctic sea ice extent is at a record high, rather than close to record low levels. In addition, Rose wrongly implied that annual global average surface temperature shows cooling over the past 15 years. In fact, the Met Office’s data shows that the linear trend between 1997 and 2012 was a warming of 0.05 centigrade degrees per decade. And the trend in global surface temperature does not, in any case, explain why Arctic sea ice extent was lower in August 2012 than last month.