I was expecting a very low sea-ice extent this September, and you can imagine the expression on my face when I saw the DMI graph take this turn:

The refusal of the sea-ice to set a new recent-time record for a low minimum must have caused moaning among Alarmists, but I haven’t had the time to lurk at the periphery of their websites. Rehab takes up too much time. But I have needed to recover from rehab, which allows me to idly sit around and think about all I’ve learned, over the past twenty years of studying the quirks of arctic sea-ice expansions and contractions. Often my thinking drifts off into a pleasant snooze, and I conclude the subject is far vaster and more marvelous than I could have imagined when I first began probing. It’s too big for my little brains, but I’m glad I’ve been a witness. It has in some ways been like walking through a sterile desert and abruptly coming out on the brink of the Grand Canyon.

Right from my first awareness of Alarmist theory I sensed they simplified far too much. I knew they were “wrong” because I knew Vikings had sailed in open boats and raised crops and herded 2000 cows and 100,000 sheep and goats where it can’t be done today, and therefore the arctic had been milder even as recently as 1000 years ago, without terrible repercussions. However I knew nothing about how this came to be. I became curious about what the cycles of more sea-ice and less sea-ice involved.

Now, at the end of my life, I feel I am glimpsing a oneness I wish I had started out with. I’ve spent a lifetime finding the starting line.

In a nutshell, what I see is this:

The sun goes through its cycles, and is so massive, compared to our speck of a planet, that its changes affect all levels of our world. The airy atmosphere is affected, and the fluid seas, and even the seemingly solid earth. (The earth is actually magma beneath the crust, so, though slower than water and air, it too is fluid and can be shifted by the whims of our sun).

Considering the enormity of what the sun could set in motion, it seemed downright comical Alarmists wanted to dismiss it all, and focus on a tiny fluctuation of a trace gas.

While I did waste time sinking to their level and debating about the quibble they focused on, (and you can look back to earlier posts on this site if you are interested in such quibble), what always interested me more was the history they did not want to look at. They would make nice, neat maps of how the sea-ice used to be solid but now was melted, but I could find historical records of whalers sailing where they said there was solid ice.

A major derangement of “normal” situations occurred around 1817, when there was a enormous discharge of sea-ice into the North Atlantic, creating a very cold summer in western Europe, but amazingly open waters towards the North Pole that whalers noticed. This historical event, “the year with no summer” in Europe and “Eighteen Hundred and froze to death” in New England, has been studied and linked to two of the biggest volcanic events of the millennium, in 1810, and 1815, and also with a lack of sunspots called “The Dalton Minimum.”

Initially I was scornful of the idea anything as gentle as a sunbeam could move something as mighty as a volcano, but, thinking about tides, I gradually came around, until I began to wonder if the current shortage of sunspots, which some call “The Modern Minimum,” might result in a major derangement of sea-ice, as occurred in 1817. Alarmists would gleefully state the flushing of ice was due to CO2, I supposed, but the derangement would just do its thing and ignore them.

To a degree my theory was verified, first by the spectacular Tonga Pacific eruption, and then by the hidden seismic events along the Mid Atlantic Ridge which apparently warmed the entire Atlantic Ocean. In any case, I began to expect a record low sea-ice extent this September, not because of CO2, but because of lava.

Things started out on course, with DMI records showing the lowest December, January, February and March levels “ever”, (or since 1979), but then things began to wobble in a new way. Briefly June was second warmest in the brief DMI record, but now we have seen September pass and only rank as fifteenth lowest.

This has caused a glitch in the Alarmist idea the sea-ice is steadily shrinking along a straight “trend line.” Records fit their “trend line”, over the past nineteen years, for the month of January:

However, for the month of September over the past nineteen years, it looks like the straight trend-line is getting badly bent:

It is an inconvenient truth, for Alarmists, that we have more sea-ice in September, 2025 than in 2006, because they stress the idea that the decline will be steady (and disastrous). Therefore they will need to say it only looks like there is more, but there is actually less. The figures will need to be “adjusted”, by men in white coats who speak with great authority about things such as the “volume” of the sea-ice, (which are difficult to do more than estimate).

It is also an inconvenient truth, for me, that things didn’t copy 1817. There was no vast cross-polar-flow flushing huge amounts of sea-ice into the North Atlantic. Therefore I need to shrug and admit I got it wrong, and then marvel over what actually happened.

What seems to have happened is that the seismic activity along the mid-Atlantic ridge quit, and the ocean has started to lose it’s heat. Not that it is not still warmer than normal, although, as hurricane after hurricane has curved out to sea (perhaps attracted by the warmth) there are some waters churned to below normal temperatures.

The sea-ice has been melted north of Svalbard, and Barents Sea has less ice than usual, but this is not conducive to warming the Arctic Sea. Water stays warmer when sheltered by a lid of ice, but much Atlantic heat will be squandered to the cold arctic skies before the sea-ice can regrow and shelter it.

Meanwhile, on the Pacific side, there has been seismic activity, north of Japan, and a very warm patch of Pacific water has developed, likely to cause the jet stream to become loopy this winter, which can chill North America if the jet loops north in Siberia and then digs south across Bering Strait.

Or maybe not. I’ll leave it to forecasters better than I to predict how that Pacific hot-spot will influence winter. I plan to sit back and watch. In some ways I’m like a retired ball-player; I can’t get out there and play, but I can admire the players.

I do wish I was just starting, for it seems young meteorologists have data it was difficult to even dream about, sixty years ago.

What is really interesting to do is to go back 150 years, and see what the meteorologists yearned to know. In those days they yearned to know more about the upper atmosphere. So they found a way. First it was weather balloons, and later satellites, but now they know, but it is not enough. Now they yearn to know more about the seas, and the currents below the surface, and even to know about the magma that slowly surges lava tides beneath the planet’s crust. And of course some look to the sun, and yearn to know more about the weather of what amounts to an unimaginably huge, long-term hydrogen bomb. And, while witnessing these genius minds attempting to find order, (which might allow prediction), in the massive scope of all these fields, one also witnesses odd, little people utterly focused on a small fluctuation of a trace gas.

The massive scope consists of the upper atmosphere, surface winds and temperatures, sea surface temperatures and currents, deep sea currents, and magma motions. It is huge and mighty like a lion. CO2 is a trace gas. To focus on CO2 is like focusing on a hair follicle of a lion.

Don’t get me wrong. A brilliant detective like Sherlock Holmes can learn a lot from a hair follicle. He would figure out it belonged to a lion, and his attention would shift in that direction. However Global Warming Alarmists don’t want Sherlock deducing in that direction.

Why not? Because they have subscribed to a conclusion which is incorrect. They believe the hair follicle is not a hair follicle, but actually the quill of a feather. Sherlock is therefore wrong to envision a lion.

Sherlock is not wrong, but Alarmists have an amazing trillion dollars funding their effort to portray a follicle as a quill, and to silence the likes of Sherlock. And, in their little world, they have succeeded, but in the real world the lion prowls and roars, and a trillion dollars cannot bribe an inch from the claw of the tides. A trillion dollars cannot move the sea-ice from its appointed shift. A trillion dollars cannot cow nature and make it behave stupidly, but it can make men be fools. They will state a follicle is a quill, and marginalize Sherlock, for a mere trillion. Meanwhile, in the real world, a follicle is more than a hair, it is part of a vibrant, roaring lion, brimming with power, danger, and fun.

Stay tuned.

P.S. The waters on the Pacific side, although ice-covered in terms of “ice extent” calculations, are actually in many ways open, for they consists of bergs floating about. Even water 85% open, covered with a smattering of 15% bergs, counts as “ice-covered” in some “extent” calculations. This slushy situation flash-freezes to more solid ice with amazing speed (very alarming to sailors who have described attempting to avoid being caught in the clutches of such freeze-up’s for over two hundred years,) But, for the moment, much exposed water is losing heat to the arctic night. It shows in the DMI polar air temperatures graph:

I suppose the Alarmist view is that such above-average temperatures show the Pole is warming, but I believe in actual fact it shows how our planet is squandering heat and losing it to the arctic night.

The Alarmist theory states open waters at the Pole will absorb more sunlight, and warm the waters. Indeed this actually happens in the marginal seas close to the coasts, helped by early summer’s flooding arctic rivers and a sun over thirty degrees up in the sky. However it doesn’t happen when the sun has sunk to five degrees. Open water then reflects more sunlight than dirty snow does. And, when the sun has actually set for months on end, open water can absorb no sunlight. All it can do is lose heat.

The lion roars.