Interesting ice extent maps from 1901 and beyond

[padruig]

7. An interesting piece of heresay ...

Coverage maps tell us the extent of the ice but in the hands of the master manipulator do a better job of lying with "statistics" than establishing true trends.

Here in Washington State the alpine glacial fields have suffered so much ice mass loss that many of the conjoined glaciers have retracted to their feeder troughs.

Hit the 'delight' button, the climate denier prances playfully that the 'number of glaciers' increasing are increasing when the total measured ice mass is down by 40 to 50 percent in just 100 years.

They use the same flawed logic with the glacial fields in Antarctica, based on photographic data some of them are growing in length but the gravimetric data from the GRACE satellites show us that the 'growth' is actually the thinning of the glacial ice mass.

In the arctic, we measure the ice by its age. Seasonal ice is year old, multiyear ice is three or more years in age and then we have transitional ice older than one year but not old enough to contribute to multiyear ice.

What Mr. Watt isn't telling his readers is that a recent study by Perovich in the Geophysical Research Letters (doi:10.1029/2012GL051432 ) shows that the young seasonal ice actually has less albedo than the multiyear ice thereby increasing the thermal heating in the arctic region.