I always appreciate Willis’ writing, but this is particularly insightful and informative. The fact is, the Arctic is not warming the planet. In fact, the ice isn’t even melting at this point. We shall see, but it seems to me we’ve probably past the peak, and we will be chilling for the next several years. I hope not. Cold kills. Warmer is better.
There’s a new study in PNAS, entitled “Observational determination of albedo decrease caused by vanishing Arctic sea ice” by Pistone et al. Let me start by registering a huge protest against the title. The sea ice is varying, it isn’t “vanishing”, that’s just alarmist rhetoric that has no place in science.
In any case, here’s their figure 4B, showing the decrease in albedo from the “vanishing” sea ice:
Figure 1. Graph from Pistone2014 showing CERES albedo data (green, solid line) for the ocean areas of the Arctic.
The authors say:
Using the relationship between SSM/I and CERES measurements to extend the albedo record back in time, we find that during 1979–2011 the Arctic darkened sufficiently to cause an increase in solar energy input into the Arctic Ocean region of 6.4 ± 0.9 W/m2, equivalent to an increase of 0.21 ± 0.03 W/m2 averaged over the…
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