Post by marchesarosa on Nov 23, 2010 11:09:48 GMT 1
UPDATE
Final 2010 Arctic Sea Ice Summary – Sea Ice News #30
Posted on November 23, 2010 by Anthony Watts
I’m a bit late in getting this posted, as I’ve had a number of distractions the past week. But here it is, the post mortem report on 2010 Arctic Sea ice minimum. Of course the most interesting aspect is how well did the forecasts from the various scientists and groups do at predicting the 2010 minimum? This graph from the SEARCH report (in entirety below) sums it up pretty well:
red dashed line represents the 2010 minimum
The yellow highlight shows that Steve Goddard, who supplied sea ice commentary for WUWT over the past year before starting his own blog here stevengoddard.wordpress.com/ did better than many of the scientists and groups who made forecasts submitted to Study of Environmental ARctic CHange (SEARCH). His forecast at 5.1 million square kilometers (as seen in the SEARCH graph above) wasn’t that far off, was in the middle of the pack, and certainly better than the other ends of the forecast spectrum.
Forecasting is always a risk, and the closer you get to the target point, the better your skill will be. Forecasts made further out always have a greater chance of missing the mark, such as this one by NSIDC’s Dr. Mark Serreze did on Climate Progress on May 24, 2010:
As Arctic sea ice shrinks faster than 2007, NSIDC director Serreze says, "I think it’s quite possible we could break another record this year.”
Well, no new record was set, and sea ice certainly didn’t go higher than 2009 as we talked about here, so there were errors on both sides.The ground truth nature provided was in the middle.
Of course, nobody likes to admit such errors, in fact it seems that some will go to great lengths to hide them by projecting, such as video hack turned Al Gore trained environmentalist “Greenman3610″ aka Peter Sinclair. He videocasts from his home studio with sophisticated Mac slide show effects producing a YouTube feature called “Climate Denial Crock of the Week”. It’s a crock, there’s no doubting that, since he only shows one side of the 2010 sea ice forecast story, and focuses on a couple of words in a sentence for one WUWT blog post to prove his point. It’s hilarious for its sheer spinmastery, and a must watch for entertainment value:
wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/23/sea-ice-news-30-2010-arctic-sea-ice-summary/#more-28190
The lead text posted by Greenman3610 starts with a false premise, and he carries that through the whole video.
"In early summer 2010, the pseudo science blog Watts up with that informed it’s discriminating readers that this summer would decisively show that northern polar ice had ended a long term decline. They guaranteed it."
Now what’s hilarious about that spinmastery is the blog post he focused on, which was a two parter about Joe Bastardi’s AccuWeather sea ice report (which I summarized) followed by a technical summary written by Steve Goddard. You can read it here. wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/09/bastardis-monday-sea-ice-report-plus-new-analysis-of-2010-ice-distribution/
Greenman’s video opens with and focuses on a sentence and three words of ebullience from Goddard in that post, “you bet ya”, along with making the false claim of “They guaranteed it“.
Um, well, sadly no. We didn’t say “guarantee” nor say that the long term trend would end, that’s your spinning words. Like NSIDC, we made a forecast. Here’s a challenge to Mr. Sinclair: search that August 9th, 2010 WUWT article you cite for the word “guarantee” or variances of it and you won’t find it. In fact you won’t find any reference to a “guarantee” for a sea ice forecast anywhere on WUWT. But you will find a caveat using the word “guarantee” from Sea Ice News #8 on June 6th, 2010 wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/06/wuwt-arctic-sea-ice-news-8/
Conclusion : Based on current ice thickness, we should expect September extent/area to come in near the top of the JAXA rankings (near 2003 and 2006.) However, unusual weather conditions like those from the summer of 2007 could dramatically change this. There is no guarantee, because weather is very variable.
Will Mr. Sinclair correct his error? Not likely. It doesn’t fit his denigration pattern (which Helen and pals so slavishly emulate).
Yup, weather during late melt season is a big factor, even NSIDC’s Dr. Walt Meir points that out in his guest post here, wind and weather is a big factor. He wrote:
"NSIDC’s June estimate was too high compared to what actually happened.
…
First, when the thicker, older ice is in broken up floes, it is more easily “attacked” on all sides by the ocean heat and can potentially be melted completely. Second, the less consolidated ice is more easily pushed around by the ice and more susceptible to winds pushing the ice together – in other words, the effect of the wind is amplified. I think this is a major reason why a lot of the forecasts were too high.
…
To be sure, some of this could be attributed to luck, because there is always the wildcard of what the weather will do over the summer."
Certainly at that time of the WUWT post that Greenman focuses on it looked like 2010 would come out a bit ahead of 2009. But even though NSIDC’s forecasts were also initially too high (so was WUWT’s) and NSIDC director Serreze goes out on a limb in May and says:
As Arctic sea ice shrinks faster than 2007, NSIDC director Serreze says, “I think it’s quite possible” we could “break another record this year.”
You won’t see either of those NSIDC forecasts that didn’t come true mentioned in Peter Sinclair’s “crock” video, as they don’t fit his narrative of denigration. But you will hear that tired old Serreze maxim of “death spiral“.
And finally, here’s the complete SEARCH forecast summary report that Peter Sinclair and his merry band of crockers don’t want you to see, even though it has some nice “crock ready” graphics in it. He doesn’t want to let slip that some other scientists did worse in sea ice forecasts than what was posted here on WUWT, and he certainly doesn’t want to let slip that NSIDC’s Dr. Walt Meir posts here (and gets accolades) and that their forecasts were initially high too. No, can’t have that, it would upset the faithful and just wouldn’t be good television. ;-)
But I suppose I’m grateful for all the attention, after all, if WUWT wasn’t the leading blog on climate with traffic that in a single day dwarfs the number of total views that Greenman gets on his videos in their life cycle, I wouldn’t be the big target. The fact that it irritates him enough to do a hit piece pleases me greatly.
But, I invite readers to compare facts from the video to what is presented above and below. I also invite other skeptical bloggers to repost this in entirety on their own blogs.
...................
Happy to comply, Anthony! Sincere, good faith postings beat snide warmist putdowns hands down, don't they? Snidery is all they are left with given the increasing number of contrary research findings now seeing the light of day.
Article continues here wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/23/sea-ice-news-30-2010-arctic-sea-ice-summary/#more-28190
Final 2010 Arctic Sea Ice Summary – Sea Ice News #30
Posted on November 23, 2010 by Anthony Watts
I’m a bit late in getting this posted, as I’ve had a number of distractions the past week. But here it is, the post mortem report on 2010 Arctic Sea ice minimum. Of course the most interesting aspect is how well did the forecasts from the various scientists and groups do at predicting the 2010 minimum? This graph from the SEARCH report (in entirety below) sums it up pretty well:
red dashed line represents the 2010 minimum
The yellow highlight shows that Steve Goddard, who supplied sea ice commentary for WUWT over the past year before starting his own blog here stevengoddard.wordpress.com/ did better than many of the scientists and groups who made forecasts submitted to Study of Environmental ARctic CHange (SEARCH). His forecast at 5.1 million square kilometers (as seen in the SEARCH graph above) wasn’t that far off, was in the middle of the pack, and certainly better than the other ends of the forecast spectrum.
Forecasting is always a risk, and the closer you get to the target point, the better your skill will be. Forecasts made further out always have a greater chance of missing the mark, such as this one by NSIDC’s Dr. Mark Serreze did on Climate Progress on May 24, 2010:
As Arctic sea ice shrinks faster than 2007, NSIDC director Serreze says, "I think it’s quite possible we could break another record this year.”
Well, no new record was set, and sea ice certainly didn’t go higher than 2009 as we talked about here, so there were errors on both sides.The ground truth nature provided was in the middle.
Of course, nobody likes to admit such errors, in fact it seems that some will go to great lengths to hide them by projecting, such as video hack turned Al Gore trained environmentalist “Greenman3610″ aka Peter Sinclair. He videocasts from his home studio with sophisticated Mac slide show effects producing a YouTube feature called “Climate Denial Crock of the Week”. It’s a crock, there’s no doubting that, since he only shows one side of the 2010 sea ice forecast story, and focuses on a couple of words in a sentence for one WUWT blog post to prove his point. It’s hilarious for its sheer spinmastery, and a must watch for entertainment value:
wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/23/sea-ice-news-30-2010-arctic-sea-ice-summary/#more-28190
The lead text posted by Greenman3610 starts with a false premise, and he carries that through the whole video.
"In early summer 2010, the pseudo science blog Watts up with that informed it’s discriminating readers that this summer would decisively show that northern polar ice had ended a long term decline. They guaranteed it."
Now what’s hilarious about that spinmastery is the blog post he focused on, which was a two parter about Joe Bastardi’s AccuWeather sea ice report (which I summarized) followed by a technical summary written by Steve Goddard. You can read it here. wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/09/bastardis-monday-sea-ice-report-plus-new-analysis-of-2010-ice-distribution/
Greenman’s video opens with and focuses on a sentence and three words of ebullience from Goddard in that post, “you bet ya”, along with making the false claim of “They guaranteed it“.
Um, well, sadly no. We didn’t say “guarantee” nor say that the long term trend would end, that’s your spinning words. Like NSIDC, we made a forecast. Here’s a challenge to Mr. Sinclair: search that August 9th, 2010 WUWT article you cite for the word “guarantee” or variances of it and you won’t find it. In fact you won’t find any reference to a “guarantee” for a sea ice forecast anywhere on WUWT. But you will find a caveat using the word “guarantee” from Sea Ice News #8 on June 6th, 2010 wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/06/wuwt-arctic-sea-ice-news-8/
Conclusion : Based on current ice thickness, we should expect September extent/area to come in near the top of the JAXA rankings (near 2003 and 2006.) However, unusual weather conditions like those from the summer of 2007 could dramatically change this. There is no guarantee, because weather is very variable.
Will Mr. Sinclair correct his error? Not likely. It doesn’t fit his denigration pattern (which Helen and pals so slavishly emulate).
Yup, weather during late melt season is a big factor, even NSIDC’s Dr. Walt Meir points that out in his guest post here, wind and weather is a big factor. He wrote:
"NSIDC’s June estimate was too high compared to what actually happened.
…
First, when the thicker, older ice is in broken up floes, it is more easily “attacked” on all sides by the ocean heat and can potentially be melted completely. Second, the less consolidated ice is more easily pushed around by the ice and more susceptible to winds pushing the ice together – in other words, the effect of the wind is amplified. I think this is a major reason why a lot of the forecasts were too high.
…
To be sure, some of this could be attributed to luck, because there is always the wildcard of what the weather will do over the summer."
Certainly at that time of the WUWT post that Greenman focuses on it looked like 2010 would come out a bit ahead of 2009. But even though NSIDC’s forecasts were also initially too high (so was WUWT’s) and NSIDC director Serreze goes out on a limb in May and says:
As Arctic sea ice shrinks faster than 2007, NSIDC director Serreze says, “I think it’s quite possible” we could “break another record this year.”
You won’t see either of those NSIDC forecasts that didn’t come true mentioned in Peter Sinclair’s “crock” video, as they don’t fit his narrative of denigration. But you will hear that tired old Serreze maxim of “death spiral“.
And finally, here’s the complete SEARCH forecast summary report that Peter Sinclair and his merry band of crockers don’t want you to see, even though it has some nice “crock ready” graphics in it. He doesn’t want to let slip that some other scientists did worse in sea ice forecasts than what was posted here on WUWT, and he certainly doesn’t want to let slip that NSIDC’s Dr. Walt Meir posts here (and gets accolades) and that their forecasts were initially high too. No, can’t have that, it would upset the faithful and just wouldn’t be good television. ;-)
But I suppose I’m grateful for all the attention, after all, if WUWT wasn’t the leading blog on climate with traffic that in a single day dwarfs the number of total views that Greenman gets on his videos in their life cycle, I wouldn’t be the big target. The fact that it irritates him enough to do a hit piece pleases me greatly.
But, I invite readers to compare facts from the video to what is presented above and below. I also invite other skeptical bloggers to repost this in entirety on their own blogs.
...................
Happy to comply, Anthony! Sincere, good faith postings beat snide warmist putdowns hands down, don't they? Snidery is all they are left with given the increasing number of contrary research findings now seeing the light of day.
Article continues here wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/23/sea-ice-news-30-2010-arctic-sea-ice-summary/#more-28190