However, try Googling that and you'll see it might be common in the climate science community but it's certainly not well known. If and when the Arctic is reported as being declared ice free, do you think that fairly pertinent bit of information will be included?
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Edit: I don't usually like to make predictions but this one I'm almost certain of. If and when minimum Arctic ice extent reaches 1 million square miles, it will be reported as ice free in the US (the unit conversion factor and all) and will be echoed world wide. Close enough to make a good story, right?
I'm surprised that deniers ever bring this up. Clearly this prediction by Maslowski seems too aggressive on the time frame, but there is little disputing that the amount of arctic ice cover is decreasing. Just look at the link that Maxx posted--it would be very easy to come up with a simple linear regression from the data shown on that plot, and you would probably get just a few decades as your answer (whether or not you split hairs like Ottawa Mike). So is that your argument against global warming, that it is slower than we thought? I'm afraid once you do that you've already lost the argument.
EDIT: Flossie--I haven't changed ANY goalposts. Frankly, there is not a lot of experience forecasting the disappearance of the Arctic ice pack, so the idea that models might be perfect in forecasting it is your own foolishness, not mine or anyone else's. Do you know who Lewis Fry Richardson was? He was the first person to produce a numerical forecast of weather, which he did by laborious calculation while working as an ambulance driver during World War I. His forecast was horribly wrong, however his work laid the foundation for the accurate short-term (< 5 day) weather forecasts that we have today. You're trying to take me and all of science to task for one person's forecast, which was not even published as a paper, it was presented at the meeting of the AGU. That means that it was not even reviewed by his peers. I think few scientists would have agreed with his assessment.
Unlike predictions out 75 or 100 years, many people alive today probably WILL be alive when the arctic becomes ice-free. Besides, as Bob Dylan said, you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing, and it doesn't take much sophistication to look at decreasing ice area every year and see that times are a-changing.
Mid-September
Arctic Ice Extent Graph
http://arctic-roos.org/observations/sate...
Please work on your reading comprehension.
"Could be ice free" =/= "Absolutely and without question will be ice free"...
Also, sometimes specific predictions are *wrong*. It happens. We're making educated guesses here, not using magical crystal balls.
Are you trying to say that if scientists' predictions are not absolutely accurate, and the Arctic isn't ice-free for another decade or so, that the Earth isn't warming?
Answer me this. Which of these predictions is consistent with a planet that *is not warming*?
A. The Arctic will be ice-free in the next 5 years
B. The Arctic will be ice-free in the next 20 years
C. The Arctic will be ice-free in the next 50 years
D. The Arctic will not be ice-free in the foreseeable future
I'll give you a hint: if Arctic ice is still decreasing in extent, then *it's getting warmer*.
August to October.
The simple answer is mid September.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charct...
Clearly it's extremely unlikely that it will be ice free this year, so that estimate was premature, but the trend is obviously in that direction. The Ice is reducing in thickness as well as extent so I would expect the rate of loss to accelerate; if things continue as they are I would expect we will be seeing Ice free conditions in a couple of decades or so.
What time of year is Arctic ice extent at its lowest?
Only as the Artic will be ice free this year, I was wondering when to book my holidays so I can sail to the North Pole.
The passage of time has not been kind to the Arctic's fortunes: Where scientists once predicted the Arctic would be ice-free by the end of the century, they revised their estimates in recent months to 2030 and now - stunningly - to 2013. Presenting the findings of his modeling studies at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, Wieslaw Maslowski, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, explained that earlier projections had low-balled the real values by not accounting for some of the processes driving the ice loss
http://www.treehugger.com/clean-technology/arctic-ice-free-by-2013.html
Arctic summers ice-free 'by 2013'
By Jonathan Amos
Science reporter, BBC News, San Francisco
Arctic summer melting in 2007 set new records
More details
Scientists in the US have presented one of the most dramatic forecasts yet for the disappearance of Arctic sea ice.
Their latest modelling studies indicate northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years.
Professor Wieslaw Maslowski told an American Geophysical Union meeting that previous projections had underestimated the processes now driving ice loss.
Summer melting this year reduced the ice cover to 4.13 million sq km, the smallest ever extent in modern times.
Remarkably, this stunning low point was not even incorporated into the model runs of Professor Maslowski and his team, which used data sets from 1979 to 2004 to constrain their future projections.
In the end, it will just melt away quite suddenly
Professor Peter Wadhams
"Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007," the researcher from the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, explained to the BBC.
"So given that fact, you can argue that may be our projection of 2013 is already too conservative
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7139797.stm
