by Dana Nuccitelli, via Skeptical Science

The record Arctic sea ice decline this year has predictably and deservedly received a fair amount of media attention.  Jonathan Leake of the Sunday Times recently penned an article on the impending sea ice record.  The bulk of the article was quite good, but at the end succumbed to the standard mainstream media practice of seeking “balance,” thus including some comments by John Christy.  Christy has become very reliable for arguing that anything and everything related to climate change probably just boils down to natural variability, as he recently told US Congress was the case with regards to the frequency of extreme weather events, contrary to the body of peer-reviewed scientific literature.

As we will see in this post, Christy once again misrepresented the body of scientific literature with regards to Arctic sea ice extent in his efforts to paint the Arctic sea ice death spiral as nothing out of the ordinary.

2012 vs. 1940

In Leake’s article, Christy was paraphrased as saying that there is

“…anecdotal and other evidence suggesting similar melts from 1938-43 and on other occasions.”

Christy’s comments to Leake via email slightly differed from Leake’s paraphrasing, as Christy claimed that evidence suggests summer melts during 1938-43 were “very low extent.”  This is a rather vague and subjective statement – very low relative to what?  Given the context, Leake understandably appears to have assumed that Christy meant very low relative to recent years, and perhaps he did, but it is also possible that he meant ‘very low’ relative to the early 20th Century, for example.

This begs the obvious question – in the scientific literature, how does Arctic sea ice extent during the period 1938-43 compare to the rest of the 20th Century and current levels?  One of the most widely used long-term estimates of Arctic sea ice extent comes from Walsh and Chapman (2001), whose data are available from the University of Illinois (updated through 2008).  A description of the vast array of data used by Walsh and Chapman is available via tamino here, and the data are plotted in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Average July through September Arctic sea ice extent 1870-2008 from the University of Illinois (Walsh & Chapman 2001 updated to 2008) and observational data from NSIDC for 2009-2011 (blue), with a fourth order polynomial fit (black soiid line).  Black vertical dashed lines indicate the years 1938-43.

Clearly the extent of Arctic sea ice during 1938-43 was nowhere near as low as current levels, based on these data.  According to this reconstruction, the minimum extent during that timeframe (9.8 million square kilometers in 1940) was higher than it has been at any time since 1979.  In other words, Arctic sea ice extent has been lower than it was in 1938-43 during the entire satellite record, and the current average summer extent is approximately 4.3 million square kilometers lower than the 1940 minimum.

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A penny for your cyber-thoughts.

So Many Great Options for Gas

By Mike Peters, the Cartoonist Group

 

by Elisa Wood, via Renewable Energy World

We don’t think about energy until something goes wrong, and this week things went wrong on an historic level. As a result, the public and pundits are again focusing on the fragility of big electric grids.

Ten percent of the world’s population — more than 600 million people — lost their power in India on July 31, marking the largest blackout in history. India’s grid collapse follows the storm-related outages that left Washington, D.C. sweltering for days when a freak super derecho hit in June.

So the timing couldn’t be better to accelerate consumer education about smart grid, and the non-profit Smart Grid Consumer Collaborative (SGCC) is on the job.

Smart grid uses high tech devices to make the electric system more sophisticated and less likely to fail. It also opens the way for a future of decentralized power, where the home, car, and office building each become power plants in their own right.

But smart grid requires a degree of customer energy self-management, something foreign to most of us. So the energy industry has been working hard to figure out how to interest consumers in the various energy displays, time-of-use rates, smart meters and other tools of smart grid.

To do this, utilities must get inside the head of the consumer, something Proctor & Gamble or Apple Computer do routinely, but monopoly-based utilities have never before found necessary.

In an effort to help, SGCC recently not only asked consumers what they think about smart grid, but also video-taped their responses. After all, sometimes what we say only half reveals what we mean. How we say something means a lot.

“It’s one thing to read a one dimensional set of quotes. But it is another thing entirely to watch consumers and hear them saying in their own words what they think and what they know,” said Patty Durand, SGCC executive director, in a recent interview.

The group interviewed 24 consumers in Atlanta, Los Angeles and Chicago. What did the interviews reveal, and how can the information help utilities?

It turns out consumers do want data about their energy use, but also want help understanding what it means and how to use it. They worry about reliability and price and in some cases the environment. Most important, says Durand, they don’t all think alike, so shouldn’t all be approached by utilities in the same way.

Consumers generally fall into five categories, she said.

• Traditionals – Often senior citizens who oppose change
• Do-it-yourselfers – They want to save money and mange their spending
• Easy Streets –  Highly educated consumers or those making a good income who want to save time and avoid waste
• Young Americans – Those just starting out who don’t know much about smart grid but want to learn
• Concerned Greens – Environmentally motivated individuals who are highly likely to embrace smart grid Read more