In past posts I’ve gone on at length about how much of the warming seen at the Pole is due to a small increase in humidity. Over the past ten years I’ve described “feeder bands” of moisture sucked up into a “Ralph” (Anomalous area of low pressure) within the Arctic Circle, and we’ve seen temperatures jump as much as twenty degrees. One December temperatures near the Pole rose a hair above freezing, leading to a wondrous slew of headlines about how Santa Claus might drown because the North Pole was melting. Besides traumatizing children, which some Alarmists are too good at, (and should be ashamed about), the sensationalism didn’t make much sense for the “warmth” swiftly was lost to the dark skies of the long arctic night. However as that moisture met the cold it was precipitated out, releasing its latent heat, (that much more “warmth” lost to outer space), and flakes fell, amounting to a startlingly small amount of snow. The arctic is basically a desert, and some “Ralphs” might only drop a tenth of an inch of snow.
A bit of simple arithmetic tells me that, at a ten to one ratio, a tenth of an inch of snow only amounts to a hundredth of an inch of rain. Yet that tiny amount of moisture can raise the temperatures ten to twenty degrees in the arctic. Such a minuscule amount of moisture would have no such effect in the jungles at the equator. Quite obviously something is going on beyond the scope of simple arithmetic.
When I attempt to apply my small mind to the problem I run up against all sorts of oddities which are fascinating, and I can’t explain. Between sunrise and noon, in jungles at the equator, temperatures rise ten to twenty degrees, but moisture increases through evaporation, and the air gains water, holding far more water than arctic air can hold. Some of this air billows up as dramatic thunderheads which pour down inches of rain which (at a ten-to-one ratio) would translate to feet of snow, but there is no warming to be seen. In fact there is cooling (especially when hailstones are mixed in with the downpours.)
In conclusion, it is obvious humidity is a metric which eludes measurement by a simple thermometer. A degree at the Pole is not the same as a degree at the equator. To treat them the same is accepting a misnomer; it is like giving a square foot of feathers the same weight as a square foot of lead. I may not understand “saturation mixing ratios” but I have gathered that a certain absurdity is involved when polar temperatures are given the same weight as temperatures at the equator, when creating an “average” for earth.
In fact the use of such polar warmth to tilt averages seems to suggest some scientists have brains like coal mines, for they claim such temperatures are canaries in a coal mine, and they are obviously bird brains.
Sorry about that. Lord, forgive me, for I have sinned.
To be more humble, there is much that baffles me. I can’t explain what I see. For example, cold and dry Polar winters seem to lead to warmer summers, especially the month of May, whereas moist and relatively “warm” Polar winters seem to lead to cooler summers, especially the month of May. For example, compare 1960’s temperatures
With 2015’s
By the way, 2015 was the coldest May at the Pole on record, until this May,
I should confess that both this spring and 2015’s make a mess of a theory of mine. Why? Because I was playing around with the idea that the “Quiet Sun” could explain the recent sightly-cooler temperatures at the Pole. The effect couldn’t appear during winter, when there is no sunshine, but would appear in the summer, when there is sunshine 24 hours a day. The slight decrease in the sun’s radiance would therefore be seen as a slight decrease in temperature. But a problem appears when the Quiet Sun is most “noisy”, at the peak of the sunspot cycle. At that point the slight-cooling should be slightest, but instead we see it set records, at least in the month of May.
Joseph D’Aleo, on his Weatherbell blog, mentioned warming associated with peaks in the sunspot cycle, back in February. He said often they occur simultaneously with an El Nino, and stated it looked like it might happen again.
And an El Nino has appeared right on cue.
So we have a repeat of three events. The solar cycle peaks, an El Nino appears, and a record cold month of May occurs at the Pole. I suppose it could be a coincidence, but it sure would be nice if we could discuss possible connections between the events, like responsible adults with active minds. Unfortunately immature adults censor and shadow-ban you, if you suggest anything but CO2 from fossil fuels cause anything to occur. If their daughter gets pregnant they blame…
Sorry. That was uncalled for. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned again.
The cooler Pole may have slowed the start to the summer melting to some extent, in terms of the “extent” graph. The extent went from the lowest recently recorded around March 15 to the highest recently recorded on June 1.
One reason for the low maximum extent was that, right at the peak of the ice-growing season, storms shifted north winds to east winds in Baffin Bay, pushing the sea-ice, which had been spread out past the 50-50 latitude-longitude, back towards the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland. Such compression doesn’t lessen the volume, but definitely lessens the area the sea-ice covers, reducing “extent”.
The same thing happened off the east coast of Greenland, and there, while the compression doesn’t lower volume, the export of ice through Fram Strait and down through Denmark Strait has a considerable effect on the volume of sea-ice left, back up in the arctic. This has been an impressive winter, since around the end of January, for exports. Currently Denmark Strait is filled with sea-ice from Greenland to Iceland, something rarely seen even in midwinter, and some forecasts suggest the ice may spread along Iceland’s north coast this coming week.
These large exports of sea-ice is starting to have an effect on the (adjusted) DMI “volume” graph.
I have been watching to see if the sea-surface temperatures in the North Atlantic dropped, for in the past great discharges (especially around 1816-1817) have cooled the North Atlantic to a degree where it made the summer in Western Europe colder. There is some colder water between Iceland and Norway, but nothing dramatic.
What baffles me is the very cold water east of New England and south of Newfoundland. You can see the warm Gulf Stream worming its way through the cold, but I should think the current will be significantly chilled on its way to Europe. I assume the chill is an up-welling, though perhaps it is a counter-current, some expanded form of the Labrador Current. In any case, all these currents wind their way north and eventually reach the edge of the sea-ice boundary between Svalbard, Frans Josef Land and Nova Zemlya.
Lifting our eyes that way, I point out the sea-ice crushed up against the north coast of Svalbard. Also the streamer of thicker ice exiting the north Kara Sea by Severnaya Zemlya and making a beeline to Fram Strait. Only recently were these easterlies replaced by westerlies, pushing ice the opposite way and creating the polinyas on the east sides of Frans Josef Land and Severnaya Zemlya.
The ice crunched up against the coast of Svalbard shows the ice is thicker there in 2023 than in 1596, for on June 17, 1596, Willem Barantsz discovered Svalbard, arriving not at the south but at the northwest tip, and three days later discovered what is now called Raudfjorden on the north coast. The two, small wooden ships they sailed were by no means ice-breakers, and it must be assumed the waters were open, which leads one to assume the WSC (West Spitsbergen Current) was in its warm phase. Currently it is not as warm, or that ice would be swiftly melted from beneath, along Svalbard’s northwest corner.
Traveling further east along Russia’s arctic coast we discover a point where conflict between the westerlies and easterlies created a divergence, thinning the sea-ice in the Laptev Sea. Less ice than usual was exported from the Laptev Sea this winter (as more than usual left the Kara Sea) but now the divergence has thinned the ice in the middle, increasing the prospects for a “Laptev Notch” of open water aiming towards the Pole this summer. West of there the sea-ice is significantly thicker, and includes some multi-year ice.
The East Siberian Sea will be interesting to watch this summer, to see if the multi-year ice can survive another summer. This is an area where sea-ice should increase, if sea-ice amounts come and go in a cycle, especially as sea-ice persists more in this area during a cold PDO, and because we just had three La Ninas in a row. But with an El Nino coming on, there may be a set back to growth. That is what I’ll be watching.
I don’t call an increase in sea-ice a “recovery”, as my study of history seems to show there is less sea-ice during climate “optimums”, and humanity is happier during such times. And…
Forgive me, Lord. I know I didn’t say it, but I did think it.
Stay tuned.
Sunrise's Swansong 