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Saturday, April 14, 2012

Arctic Ice Melt – How Much Faster Than Predicted?

Graph of the Day: Arctic Ice Melt – How Much Faster Than Predicted?

by Peter Sinclair, Climate Denial Crock of the Week, September 9, 2011

A popular bonehead meme often heard from climate deniers is, “climate models don’t work and are inaccurate.”

Sadly, in the case of Arctic sea ice melt, that’s true – but not in the way we would wish. In the graph above, dotted lines are IPCC models for arctic sea ice melt. Red line is actual observations. Dot is from NSIDC graph of September 7, 2011.

Stroeve et al. (2007), Geophysical Research Letters:
From 1953 to 2006, Arctic sea ice extent at the end of the melt season in September has declined sharply. All models participating in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report (IPCC AR4) show declining Arctic ice cover over this period. However, depending on the time window for analysis, none or very few individual model simulations show trends comparable to observations.
http://climatecrocks.com/2011/09/09/graph-of-the-day-arctic-ice-melt-how-much-faster-than-predicted/ 

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

If the prediction were made in 1950 when the model matched actual conditions, you would have a point here. But AR4 was released in 2007 when it was pretty obvious the model totally missed actual conditions for the past 50 years or so. So what value does it have to predict the future?>

Tenney Naumer said...

AR4 was a watered down version of the literature since it had to be signed off on by more than 100 countries, including Saudi Arabia.

It is fairly out of date now.