Arctic sea ice up 60%?

[Jeff M]

So am I understanding this right? There has been quite a few posts in here concerning Arctic sea ice being more this year than last year. now Goddard, according to twitter, is claiming that ice volume is at a 4 year high. He claims it is 67% higher. To get to this he does it in a rather unique way. He looks at the JAXA daily maps and counts the pixels....

https://twitter.com/rpallanuk/status/379724402038169600

Why did this not get published I wonder?
som1hastobetherookie: I think perhaps you are speaking to the wrong person? Steven Goddard certainly is not my 'climate God'. Reading his tweets I see him as a scientific illiterate actually.
Note: I am making fun of Goddards 'science' in this case. Since when does science involve counting pixels on a computer image?

[Chem Flunky]

probably because he has made the basic and obvious mistake of confusing ice *volume* with ice *extent*, and if he can make a mistake that obvious, he probably has plenty more.

[kano]

Yes I picked that up a few days ago, and asked about it.
It seems most AGW proponents and most skeptics and all MSN feel the need to exaggerate to get their point across.
The amount of ice this year is not that surprising, but what is, is that the Arctic this summer has been very cold, the coldest for at least fifty years,
Chem according to PIOMAS ice extent is up, volume is up, but thickness down.

[graphicconception]

Being sceptical, I sometimes wonder if the change from area to volume is done to give a certain perspective on the data.

However, we should not lose sight of the fact that the year before was very low and this is only a partial recovery.

On the other hand (pole), sea ice extent in Antarctica seems to be doing well.

[sillyLeader277]

I suggest that you check Goddard's math for yourself and to quit believing in every tweet you read. Yes, that is where I learned all about science is by reading the tweets of someone that no one knows who he is. Did you ever discover who Steven Goddard actually is? Yet you cling to his every tweet as though he is your climate God. What does this say about your use of critical thinking?

***Sorry, Jeff M. I was using some satire here. There are too many here that quote Steven Goddard as if he is a climate God and no one even knows who he is. I know that you understand the science. I was just showing how illogical it is of others to quote Steven Goddard. I should have stated that I was using satire. I did do a poor job of using it.

[Jim Z]

Goddard says <<<PIOMAS shows a 46% increase in volume from last year and the highest in 4 years. Junk science at its worst.>>
Note 46%Volume (obviously can't be counted with pixels)

Then Ward asks....<How did you calculate this year is 67% higher than last year?>
Where did 67% come from. Clearly I wasn't privy to the whole conversation here. Apparently the 67% is surface area of ice but it isn't clear in the question

Note: Wow, spanked by the rookie. I couldn't figure out if he was joking.

[Big Gryph]

Summer Arctic sea ice is near record lows. Expected to be 6th lowest on record I think the 60% figure is related to the octane of whatever he has been smoking http://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/20...t/2794493/

[d/dx+d/dy+d/dz]

Access to JAXA data is limited to scientists and their graduate students working on closely related projects. Goddard probably does not have access to the real data and his results are not of good enough quality to publish (except on Twitter). The results from a good analysis of real data are given in the link.

http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm

Goddard appears to be close on the ice extent increase, but his comment is misleading akin to "Give me 75% of your money and I will gladly double (100%) what is left". When the denominator is small, it is easy to get large % increases. It is better to look at the absolute values. The current ice extent of 4.8 million km^2 is well above 2012 (3 M) but below the 2000 decade (5.5 M) or 1990 decade (7 M) . The numbers in brackets are my eyeball approximations from the plot. Refer to the published papers for more accurate values. The ice extent does not translate directly to ice volume.

[antarcticice]

As far as I am aware Goddard's claim to fame is finding some statistical errors in a small section of U.S. temperature records almost a decade ago, also as far as I am aware he has found nothing else, this would seem to be confirmed by the silence when you ask deniers to post all the claimed errors he is supposed to have found.
He has posted many things on the Watts blog (really scientific, that is) as to why twitter and not a real scientific journals, sadly the answer is pretty obvious.
2013 certainly has seen sea ice extent increase over the 2012 level, a level that has become the new record low.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/...igure2.png
As is pretty obvious from the dotted line, but also obvious is that 2013 does not stand out much from the several years before 2012 and all are well below the long term average.
A better title for the question might have been 'Godard's fibs about Arctic sea ice up 60%'
The NSIDC graph shows the last 6 years it shows no great recovery, in fact it shows the levels of 2013 below those of 2009 for most of the period covered so there goes the 4 year high, now it's a 3 year high. It's interesting how deniers keep telling us we can't use short term data to make estimates (even though we don't) yet they then try to use just a couple of years to make claims about what sea ice is doing, while trying very hard to ignore the 35 year record.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/...gure31.png

[Hey Dook]

My answer to this is the same as my answer to the circa 188 previous times this question (in your case) or "question" (in most other cases) or some slight variant thereof has been posted:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/1_A...or2012.gif