This really is good news for folks who really worry about polar bears, not use them as foils for global warming. The polar ice is greater than reports had indicated, due to an error in historical data. There is also a problem with an aging satellite. The latest data shows the ice back to the normal range going back to 1979, when satellite observations began. (Picture courtesy of WattsUpWithThat.) Credit goes to the handful of careful GW skeptics that track the gushy reports from the MSM and correct bad science.
Bad science you ask? Well, consider the now debunked Steig study of Antarctic temperatures. Even though ground stations report cooling, and the British Antarctic Survey recently concluded there is cooling, Steig attempted to show warming. Almost immediately there were problems with his analysis, including confusing one groundstation with another (see When Harry Met Gill). Worse, it was even found he used negative weights for some groundstations, which makes no physical sense at all (were they upside down?) It simply shows he played with statistics to get the result he wanted, and didn't even consider what the physical explanation for his regressions were.
A further analysis of his work shows he smeared data from the small peninsula (4% of the Antarctica) that sticks up into warmer waters and applied that data to the vast continent to purport to show warming. In the end, it appears 70% of the weighting was from the warm 4% of the continent! Talk about smearing peanut butter. He even took data from an island at 52 degrees south (the same distance Amsterdam is from the North Pole) and applied it. As explained by ClimateAudit:
It is also unclear why Campbell Island (52°S) and 4 other temperate-zone oceanic weather stations were included in the 42 occupied weather stations used to measure Antarctic ice-sheet temperature, as listed in Table S2 of the SI. Amsterdam, at 52°N, would surely not be included in a study of Arctic temperatures.
I doubt any credible scientist believes Amsterdam temperatures can be used to determine Arctic temperatures; but Steig did the same sort of thing to show temperatures near the South Pole. A complete debunking can be found here.
Gavin Schmidt of NASA who runs the blog RealClimate has promoted the Steig study but now declines to rebut the falsification. Instead he has narrowed the results of Steig back to a study of "regional climate change that may well be largely due to natural variability." Oh boy, just four months ago he trumpeted "Antarctic Warming is Robust". And before that they welcomed the MSM reaction to Steig with: "The most prevalent peg was the fact that the study appeared to reverse
the 'Antarctic cooling' meme that has been a staple of disinformation
efforts for a while now." The cooling of Antarctica has been a thorn in the side of GW advocates for a while. And now it remains so.
So too the Arctic Ice. So intent on proving their case with anecdotes and not science, the GW advocates completely ignored an analysis by NASA's JPL that showed the great loss in 2007 was not due to GW but to currents and wind. Essentially, the polar ice is not fixed to land, and can get twisted and pushed by winds and currents. And so it did in 2007, pushing much of it down to warmer climates, where it melted. A video of satellite photos from the Japanese makes this clear. (Courtesy WattsUpWithThat.) You can see the ice get pushed into warmer waters, and then break up.
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