Revkin seems to have forgotten that "experts" absolutely DID suggest that the 2007 melt season was evidence of global warming.
Revkin: "Big" Flaw in Will’s Ice Assertions - Dot Earth Blog - NYTimes.comThe total area of sea ice in both hemispheres, by the ice center’s accounting, was “near or slightly lower than” area observed at a similar time of year in 1979, not equal to it.
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Mr. Will asserted that “many experts” said the ice retreat in a single year was “evidence of global warming.” In that instance, I’d like to have some names. [for starters, how about Serreze and Abdalati (see below)]
From my days camped on the sea ice around the North Pole to my time in the country’s leading labs tracking polar trends with satellites, I’ve not met a single scientist focused on sea ice who would point to a single year’s changes as evidence of anything except the extraordinary complexity and variability up north on year-to-year time scales.
Data Show 'Arctic Is Screaming,' Scientists Say - December 12, 2007 - The New York Sun"The Arctic is screaming," a senior scientist at the government's snow and ice data center in Boulder, Colo., Mark Serreze, said.
Last year, two scientists surprised their colleagues by projecting that the Arctic sea ice was melting so fast that it could disappear entirely by the summer of 2040. This week, after reviewing his own new data, a NASA climate scientist, Jay Zwally, said: "At this rate, the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions."
So scientists in recent days have been asking themselves these questions: Was the record melt seen all over the Arctic in 2007 a blip amid relentless and steady warming? Or has everything sped up to a new climate cycle that goes beyond the worst case scenarios presented by computer models? "The Arctic is often cited as the canary in the coal mine for climate warming," Mr. Zwally, who as a teenager hauled coal, said. "Now as a sign of climate warming, the canary has died. It is time to start getting out of the coal mines."
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What happens in the Arctic has implications for the rest of the world. Faster melting there means eventual sea level rise and more immediate changes in winter weather because of less sea ice.
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More than 18 scientists told the AP that they were surprised by the level of ice melt this year.
"I don't pay much attention to one year ... but this year the change is so big, particularly in the Arctic sea ice, that you've got to stop and say, 'What is going on here?' You can't look away from what's happening here," NASA's chief of cyrospheric sciences, Waleed Abdalati, said. "This is going to be a watershed year."
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