A puzzling bit of nonsense from the ever reliable Deplorable Climate Science Blog, in his post Donald Trump Turned Her Into A Newt. This concerns an article in the Guardian I am an Arctic researcher. Donald Trump is deleting my citations by Victoria Herrmann. Aside from his Pythonesque newt obsession, Heller takes exception to her claim that:
These back-to-back data deletions come at a time when the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the global average. Just this week, it was reported that the Arctic’s winter sea ice dropped to its lowest level in recorded history.
Not so, says Heller:
Arctic sea ice extent is about the same as it always is this time of year, but climate alarmists never let facts get in the way of their brainless hysteria.
The evidence he provides to back up this claim is this graph from the Danish Meteorological Institute, DMI.
The red line shows current Arctic sea ice extent, whilst the other colored lines show the previous 4 years.
2017 is currently around the lowest or equal lowest of any of the years in the graph, and all 5 years are a lot lower than the 1981 - 2000 average extent for this time of year.
In fact all 5 years are more than 2 standard deviations below the average for this time of year.
How this can be interpreted as being about the same as it always is
is a question best left to the brain of Tony Heller.
Personally, I prefer NSIDC's charts, if only because they're clearer (using a 5 day average), and interactive. These show the Arctic currently has more than one million square kilometers less sea ice than the average for 1981 - 2010, and has been at or near an all time low since October of last year.
No comments:
Post a Comment