songster

Totally unsurprising since you didn't detrend it, since the standard deviation will be affected by the trend within the window you're calculating the s.d. for.Consider a toy model with zero noise. It's flat at temperature A for a long time (say 150 years), then rises linearly to temperature B over 30 years, then stabilises at temperature B for a long time (say 150 years). Now calculate the s.d. in 30-year windows. During the stable periods, the calculated s.d. is zero. Despite the fact that in this toy model there is ZERO random noise, during the period where temperatures are rising, the calcu

Because there are only so many ways you can say "probably, but nobody knows how" without resorting to interpretative dance.

Hasn't this already been done?Fawcett, 2007 (page 140 onwards) http://www.amos.org.au/documents/item/82 Foster and Rahmsdorf, 2011 http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/6/4/044022 Discussion at SkS and Tamino http://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=38 http://www.skepticalscience.com/foster-and-rahmstorf-measure-global-warming-signal.html http://tamino.wordpress.com/2011/12/06/the-real-global-warming-signal/

It's an inevitable consequence of the fact that last year was a record low for summer ice. Given that winter extent is much less variable, a higher proportion of it must therefore be newly formed first-year ice.

Where "intense" = "below average"? http://nsidc.org/greenland-today/images/greenland_melt_area_plot_tmb.png

Not for long... http://nsidc.org/greenland-today/images/greenland_melt_area_plot_tmb.png

While the floating ice sheet itself doesn't add to sea level when it breaks off, while it's attached, its sheer mass acts as a kind of "plug" slowing down the flow of the land-based glaciers feeding the sheet. Now that the PIG has calved, look for the flow rate of the PIG to increase. This is where the feedback increase in sea level rise comes from (bearing in mind the fact that any individual glacier's contribution is very small).

When you consider the mass of ice involved in an ice sheet that thick, I doubt the weather has any influence at all - certainly the presence of sea ice will be irrelevant. Tides might possibly affect the timing of the fracture, anything else just has too little energy.

Not by me *shrug*

And it's a model, not data.

The guy's an idiot, and so are the people that judged the competition. Edit: No doubt someone will ask why, so here goes. 1) It's far too large to sanely construct in the Arctic. It's ~150 metres tall, even leaving aside the umbrella cover. That's close to the size of the Gherkin - and you want it to float? Some oil rigs get close to that size, but they have an open superstructure to stop themselves being capsized by the wind. This proposal has a closed umbrella cover - there's no way you could make it stable. 2) It's far too small to make any impact whatsoever. The Arctic ocean

He's parroting posts from Steve Goddard's blog. Steve regularly posts sarcastic photos of the Greenland ice cap and witters about crops, in the mistaken belief that it makes some kind of point.

Going for 4 million as I think there will be a bit of a bounce back from last year, but 2007 (the previous floor) is likely the ceiling from here on in.

GW, although that's indeed dramatic, as others have pointed out we really cannot compare to previous years since we don't have comparable satellite imagery (because the satellite with that wavelength only went up last year). If you look at the overall Arctic mosaics from this year and others (they have back to 2009 on record, I very much doubt that you or any of us would be able to put them all in order without knowing which was which in advance. Yes, the cracking this February was unusual (but not completely unprecedented) - one can however argue both ways: potentially the cracking exposed

Because the base was expected to last at least another 3 months, until near the end of this year's melting season. It was established in ~September last year on the largest, thickest multi-year ice floe they could find. These should not normally melt out or fragment until September of the following year, if at all. However, they ended up having to use a floe considerably thinner than originally planned, because last year's melt was so extreme that there simply wasn't anything better that they could find to use. To see it breaking up this early in the season, well before the main melt is underw