I've been reading "predictions" of the sky falling and an ice-free arctic this year that consistently fail to match the data. it gets old and is counter-productive.
I'm inclined to agree. I'm fed up too with people hijacking the forum.
Although here we are, first week of July, and no one from the scientific community is in a position to offer any assurances that the sky won't have fallen down by September, given unfavorable
yet unremarkable weather. That's the crux of it, hoping on a roll of the dice isn't planetary risk management.
There are a lot of wild posts in this particular forum that get way ahead of any observational data or reliable forecasts, with major daily misunderstandings about how clouds and atmosphere affect certain satellite model products (despite weekly efforts at correction, see TorB at #2870 or myriad posts by wipneus on the need for rolling averaging out of clouds).
A recurrent theme here is (adolescent male) posters who know nothing about published cryosphere science and see no reason to even consider it, as they can just wing it. Seriously guys, are you smarter than Isaac standing-on-shoulders-of-giants Newton? The US tried know-nothing in the 1840's and it didn't work.
What takes in many of our oracles is that both satellite channels and institutional releases made from them are
misleadingly labelled as what they claimed/hoped could be measured with their sensor device or daily product
at the time of grant application but later found could not actually measure that well because of rapidly varying interference of clouds and atmospheric layers between the sensors and the surface which has unresolvable radiometric ambiguities of its own. (Did you expect them to pooh-pooh their own research proposal?)
Another part of the problem is we're missing a lot of what needs to be measured but cannot be measured, what we call rottenness of the ice here or in a paper like Barber 2009 (doi:10.1029/2009GL041434) and earlier. If that terminology seems a little fuzzy, the actual engineering side of ice is reviewed here:
A review of the engineering properties of sea ice
Cold Regions Science and Technology February 2010
DOI: 10.1016/j.coldregions.2009.10.003
G Timco and WF Weeks (278 and 100 previous publications resp.*)
*compare this to your own achievements which of course are vastly more impressive though you have always had more pressing things to do than diddle around writing them up or bother making the case for a what-should-be-self-evident blog prediction.
In terms of those knocking science, keep in mind that the Ph.D (that you don't have) in an applicable science or engineering discipline would just be the barest minimum. It is only with 10-20 years of additional experience that you could even hope to do significant research.
Yet we have people with zero track records whatsoever posting away here like they were shoo-ins for the next Nobel Prize.
These papers that people here blow off are very different from impulsive social media posts. They are a whole lot of work, then team-written and re-written, overseen by veteran scientists, sometimes with several centuries of cumulative learning experience represented between the authors and peer-reviewers.
Should we lower the bar here? Drop the discourse to the lowest common denominator? That's not an option for Arctic sea ice as nature has not lowered the bar. Everything having to do with climate is complex. That's just the way it is. We have to rise to meet the challenge, not ask that everything be dumbed down.
I find posts like JayW's #2905 above useful because he went to some work to assemble a time series that the rest of us then don't need to replicate separately. The source is linked, and unlike many posts, it could be rapidly replicated or extended. And best of all, it is light on interpretation, letting the data speak for itself.
The daily volume is too large for anyone to do everything -- that's the whole point of this community forum but if everyone chips in a bit of time and a bit of value, we actually can keep up with developments. We're not going to get much ahead of them though.