PhillipS

Apologies if I'm splitting hairs, Bluewave, but August didn't see an increase in Arctic SIV, it saw a decrease in the anomaly. Arctic SIV continued to drop, albeit at a slower rate.

It's easy to just focus on the recent melt seasons but I got a jolt when I looked at the PIOMAS sea ice volume plot. The SIV is currently around 6.75K km3, just behind 2012 as ORH reported above, but the 1979-2001 average for this time of years is almost 17,000 km3, more 10,000 km3 greater than today - a loss I find sobering.

Dr Barry is welcome to come here to engage.

Remember that Dr Muller was selected to head the BEST project by the Koch Brothers - so he isn't a 'Warmist' by any stretch. The methodology they used for their research has been open and transparent - so critics have had years to critique their approach. But the so-called 'skeptics' haven't done that, have they? And their findings have been peer-reviewed and published in the scientific literature - so critics have had years to refutes any or all of their findings. But the so-called 'skeptics' haven't done that either, have they? Your attack by innuendo is meaningless in a technical discussion. If you have some peer-reviewed research which refutes the BEST findings then by all means share it. Otherwise you're just trolling.

More open Arctic ocean -> increased evaporation -> increased water vapor -> increased precipitation. But GIS Surface Mass Balance is only half of the situation. It does not include dynamic GIS processes such as glacial calving, basal melting, or meltwater runoff. Look at the Total Mass Change data for the complete situation. As you can see, the GIS has lost around 3,600 km3 (3,600 Gtons) of ice since 2003.

Keeping in mind that SMB is only half of the mass balance equation, it looks like 2016 was the fifth worst melt season of the instrumental period, and the second greatest season for runoff. Just eyeballing the graph it looks like there is a long-term decline in snowfall but I don't know if that's due to less precipitation overall or more precip falling as rain. Here's the GRACE plot of total mass balance since 2003. I expect that 2016 will have a net mass loss of around 300 Gtons (300 km3).

Here in central Texas, the installed cost for solar is around $1.80/watt ($1,800/kW). Which is why the West Texas solar farms can make a profit selling power at $0.04/kWh, the contractual price Austin Energy just signed for solar power. For a 2,000 ft2 home, you can get a ball-park cost by looking at your utility bills and adding up your total energy usage, in kWh, for a year and dividing by 1,500 (the approx annual kWh produced per kW of installed capacity) to get the size of the solar array to offset your power consumption. A more detailed and precise estimate of your solar potential is easy to produce by using the PVWATTS calculator created by NREL [link] It takes into account array location and weather for that location when calculating solar energy production.

That article is from Dec 2014, and has been superseded by more recent research. Since you like USAToday here is their more recent article on this topic [link[ But there is peer-reviewed research out there, too. The Diffenbaugh et al 2014 paper from PNAS is a good start [link]. It's abstract: California ranks first in the United States in population, economic activity, and agricultural value. The state is currently experiencing a record-setting drought, which has led to acute water shortages, groundwater overdraft, critically low streamflow, and enhanced wildfire risk. Our analyses show that California has historically been more likely to experience drought if precipitation deficits co-occur with warm conditions and that such confluences have increased in recent decades, leading to increases in the fraction of low-precipitation years that yield drought. In addition, we find that human emissions have increased the probability that low-precipitation years are also warm, suggesting that anthropogenic warming is increasing the probability of the co-occurring warm–dry conditions that have created the current California drought.

Greenland saw a steep, but brief, resurgence of surface melting DMI shows the 2014 -2015 GIS melt season (which runs Sept through Aug) as being about 75 gigatons below the long term average, and about 250 gigatons above the record surface melt in 2011 - 2012. So it was a strong, but not exceptional GIS surface melt season. The overall net mass balance hasn't been announced yet - but with recent large calving events reported I would estimate a net mass loss for 2015 of between 300 and 400 gigatons.

Bethesda Boy is intellectually incapable of manning up and admitting when he's wrong - he'll just play semantic games and torture the English language forever. I have no idea whether his issues stem from his admitted substance abuse, or underlying congenital flaws - but I hope that at some level he understands that he is his own worst enemy, and that he is solely responsible for his credibility these days being too low to measure.

It will probably go on until you man up and admit you were wrong. As shown by your own words. I know that accepting responsibility for your actions is not your strong suit, so carry on with your semantic games and weasel wording - the credibility you trash is only your own.

Peter Sinclair has an interesting post up at ClimateCrocks on the effect of increased rainfall on the GIS. [link]

Thank you for the correction - the mistake in the estimated area was mine alone. I should of checked my numbers before I hit Post.

Here is a comment on the recent Jakobshavn glacier at Nevins. And a Washington Post article that includes quotes from Jason Box and Richard Alley And last, but certainly not least, is the NASA Earth Observatory post. There is a lot of uncertainty in the estimates of the size of the calving event, but this size of event will have a big impact on the net mass balance analysis for the 2015 melt season. Many estimates put it at around 125 12.5 km2 in area, so if the glacier is 1,000 meters thick at the calving site, that would mean a loss of roughly 125 12.5 Gtons of mass in four days. And the calving goes on all year, unlike the surface melt.

Since the SMB is only one component of the GIS net mass balance, and not even the biggest component, it's a bit early to declare it a bust. The DMI calculates the GIS melt season as Sept through August, and typically DMI posts a melt season summary late in the year that combines all factors. Here is the current accumulated SMB In my estimation, 2015 will be a net 275 - 325 km3 mass loss for the GIS, well below the record in 2012 of around 400 km3.

Don't attribute to boldness what can be better explained by confusion. I found the wording of the poll, particularly the second question, rather vague.

That's a great video for information content, I just wish he were as accomplished a speaker as Dr Richard Alley. Thank you for sharing it.

The GIS is also experiencing a large amount of mass loss through glacial calving. Here's a short video of one event in June where roughly 1 km3 (1 gigaton) calved off in a matter of minutes : http://climatecrocks.com/2015/07/02/watch-as-empire-state-size-chunk-breaks-off-greenland/

Latest from NSIDC on GIS surface melting: I believe it is safe to say that recent surface melting has made up for the slow start to the melt season. I wonder is some of the acceleration of the surface melting is due to the snow melting off and exposing the darker surface of the glacial ice. Here is the albedo change plot from DMI: The DarkSnow team, led by Dr Jason Box, is now in Greenland studying the processes that affect the albedo of glacial ice. If you haven't visited their website [link], it's worth a read

After a slow start the GIS surface melting is picking up its pace. From NSIDC: The melting is increased by the albedo change of the GIS surface. From the DMI:

Rather than wait (possibly forever) for Isotherm to share links to the papers he claims support lower ECS values, I've been reading some of what Google Scholar shows as recent papers on the topic. One I found interesting, and which many of you may already have seen, is Millar et al 2015 which, if I'm understanding it fully, gives a 'best estimate' for TCR of around 1.5 C, and a range for ECS of 2.0 to around 4.5 C.

Could you please provide links to the most recent half dozen or so?

DMI has begun updating their PolarPortal website to show 2015 surface conditions. Here is the daily and accumulated Surface Mass Balance (SMB) plots: I found it interesting that over the winter Greenland had a lot more surface accumulation than 2012 did, but currently 2015 is starting the melt season from about the same point as 2012. NSIDC is also showing the GIS as having a slow start to the melt season:

The article is rubbish research. It's published in Energy & Environment, the pal-reviewed denialist journal, and it's methodology is fatally flawed. The author used a cherry-picked portion of ice core records, performed a number of questionable statistical operations, and conflates his finding to represent the entire globe. The Denier Choir has posted this on various forums, and will certainly continue to do so, but the kindest review one can make of this paper is that it represents the views of one of the 3%ers.

Um, you may be confusing SIV anomalies with SIV values. The POIMAS anomalies are from the trend line, not from a baeline. In 2006 the SIV Sept minimum was about 9,000 km3, in 2007 it was about 6,500 km3, and in 2014 it was just less than 7,000 km3. Do you really think that the Arctic SIV will increase by roughly 25% in the next few years to return to 2006 levels?