Some of you bet on the 7 day sea ice minimum which was closed on june 1. The official rules said the results were to be posted on Oct. 15. One reason for the delay is to ensure that any revisions by JAXA wouldn’t change the winner after the results were announced; the other is to avoid any risk of calling a winner merely because we’ve had an uptick in the sea ice extent. While an uptick nearly always means the minimum has been reached, calling the minimum is a sport. In sports, you never really know. So, we are going to stick to Oct. 15 to announce the official winner; by that time, we can be pretty sure nothing drastic could occur to change the results.
However, that doesn’t mean we can’t talk about the current numerical value, which is shown in the graph below:
Notice there has been an uptick. So, there is a good change we have reached the minimum. Those of you who bet values near 4.88 million square kilometers are sitting pretty! Those of you who bet on recovery are well out of the quatloo winning range. Final winner to be announced on Oct. 15.
Did you want to write 4.88 (and not 4.77) in your text?
Yes!
OK…I bite
What is with the drop to zero at 30?
Did they have equipment failure?
Somehow I tend not to believe there was a flash melt/freeze.
Would make for an interesting trend line for the period though 🙂
Ed,
JAXA had missing values for an extended period. I blanked those out in EXCEL, but it doesn’t have a nice “ignore blanks” feature when plotting. So…. I got lazy and just let it do it’s thing. The alternatives would be manually editing to eliminate the cells with the drop outs or to fiddle with the computed values during the blank period.
Lucia,
This is why I use Origin for plotting data even when I use Excel for number crunching.
denny–
What’s Origin?
Well ho ho ho. Where is Sod the coward now? He is such a wimp, he goes into hiding when the ice extent goes up.
Origin is a graphing software for science applications. Unfortunately, today it costs an arm and a leg. I use a 15 year old DOS version that works perfectly well but they keep getting fancier every other year – I guess this business model makes software companies profitable.
Dr. Sh…,
My reading is that the 2010 ice minimum is lower than the previous year’s. This is ‘good news’ for warmers. What am I missing?
test
denny–
Ok. Yes. I could export the data to a graphics package and lot in that. Or, I could use another program and plot in that. EXCEL is good for lots of quick and dirty stuff which you want to do in 10% of the time but put up with various sorts of ugliness. That’s why I described what I did as lazy.
But… for blogging, sometimes lazy is better. It’s sort of like it’s sometimes better to write something on a blackboard or erasable board than to type it up, proof-read carefully, have 7 people go over it, copyright it an isbn number.
Denny, the year is not over yet and I am predicting that the extent will go above last year’s. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter. I find it very interesting though that when they update the ice graphs Sod immediately makes a post here and since the extent went up the last week he goes into hiding. The whole notion of good news bad news is completely flawed. Starting from 1979 is a complete joke also. I could make a graph starting when there were no polar ice caps and show a graph with vast increases in ice. In my opinion, scientists that believe the temperature will rise and claim there is “missing heat” waiting to be found have an incorrect theory on the greenhouse effect. I firmly believe a lot more co2 is escaping into outerspace than they predict. Perhaps, they know it is being lost to space but refuse to admit it. Furthermore, I submit to you that dinosaurs were far more damaging to the planet than humans. I think their methane emissions were much stronger than our co2 emissions, leading me to believe there is nothing special about our rate of co2 output. There are billions of humans but there were also billions of dinosaurs.
Now of course, Dr. Michael Fann from the university of Walla Walla Washington may have a study linking global warming and comet strikes because a little known secret is that comets hate co2 and will crash into offending planets to send them a message. In fact, this is probably the greatest danger due to increasing co2 emissions. Somewhere out there, a comet is boiling with rage at our ignorance toward nature.
denny (Comment#52943) September 28th, 2010 at 9:21 am
What you are missing is the fact, that this was the third year in a row with more ice than 2007, so good bye “death spiral”.
There have never been 3 years in a row with grownig ice, and 2010 was (and still is) quite warm, so the result was to be expected.
Not many people bet back when. There’s a huge gap between bets of 4.2 and 5.45. So in a sense, everybody lost – in that nobody was close. I think I’m going to be the “default” winner by being off a mere 0.57 million sq. km. My only consolation is that last year I was low. Maybe if one compares average guesses with average results, or finds an appropriate set of “adjustments”, then this could be made to look a little better. 🙂
stay tuned
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icecover.uk.php the AUC for ice minima NH 2010 may end up being => 2009
What you are missing is the fact, that this was the third year in a row with more ice than 2007, so good bye “death spiral”.
What you are missing is the fact that this was the fourth year in a row with less ice than 2006.
The death spiral argument was originally used to convey that the total ice levels each year to be lower than the previous year. This has not occurred much to the chagrin of those promoting the view.
Furthermore, there have been times of more and less Arctic sea ice than at the end of the 20th Century.
http://bprc.osu.edu/geo/publications/mckay_etal_CJES_08.pdf
Our sea ice measurements are still in its infancy and to make bold long term claims on a record of 30 odd years is fought
The death spiral argument was originally used to convey that the total ice levels each year to be lower than the previous year. This has not occurred much to the chagrin of those promoting the view.
Furthermore, there have been times of more and less Arctic sea ice than at the end of the 20th Century.
http://bprc.osu.edu/geo/publications/mckay_etal_CJES_08.pdf
Our sea ice measurements are still in its infancy and to make bold long term claims based on a short record of 30 odd years is short sighted at best.
Lucia –
It should be relatively simple to produce a dropout in the Excel graph to correspond with the JAXA data “hole”. I could describe it here, but it would probably be simpler just to show by doing. Could you possibly email the spreadsheet which you were using, or an extract therefrom? And I’ll send back an edited version.
I agree that “quick and dirty” is fine for this audience, but it really isn’t hard to produce “quick and clean” in this instance.
Neven (Comment#53059) September 29th, 2010 at 4:18 pm
And your point is?
A spiral is a figure in a plane the resembles a circle except that the radius gets continuously (in this case) smaller. So if the term could be applied here:
extend 2007 > extend 2008 > extend 2009 > extend 2010
Obviously nonsense.
I love it when people write ‘extend’ instead of ‘extent’. Hardcore WUWT resident R. de Haan does it too continuously.
Neven–You are so peeved about a poor word choice at WUWT that you wrote a comment about that here? Wow!
And then you wrote a comment about my comment. Wow!
Neven– Yes. But I commented on a comment you posted at my blog. You posted a comment on a commented posted at WUWT. Are you obsessed with WUWT or misuse of the word “extend” or what? Wow!
I’m obsessed with a certain type of people who think they are incredibly smart, but then misspell a crucial word. Good friend Alexej Buergin just did it, and then I had to think of R. de Haan (who accidentally is a paesano of mine).
“Neven (Comment#53059) September 29th, 2010 at 4:18 pm
What you are missing is the fact that this was the fourth year in a row with less ice than 2006.”
And your point is?