Personally I have my own hobby horse.
Go to the
CT interactive chart, deselect everything after 2006. Look at the comparison between what happened then and what is happening now.
Then have a look at the
solar charts and compare 2006 with 2016.
Then we look at the
2006 80N temp anomaly chart and the
2016 80N anomaly chart. Now I recall reading here that the temperatures drop then pop back up again and stay higher until the ocean has released it's heat.
Add to it the volume comparison between 2006 and 2016 plus the area and extent comparison between 2006 and 2016.
And I believe we have reached the same cycle from a different start point. But we will probably see the same kind of end. Granted we have to throw a huge El Nino into the pot and higher start temperatures and significantly more CO2 and Arctic methane to sequester the heat.
Then remember what 2007 started off as....
I think it is going to be a most instructive winter and following melt season. I would be extremely happy to be totally wrong. But it's not looking like it.
Here's the fun thing.
How do you compare one season with another when the only thing which is relatively constant is the solar output?? The temperatures are higher, globally, the CO2 is higher, Globally, the Methane is higher, locally, the Arctic ice is radically lower in volume.
Yet there is an expectation that we can compare one season with another. I don't believe we can. I believe we can only look at how each season unfolds and try to map it into a pattern of how the seasons have unfolded before.
Because when everything else is different, temp, CO2, Ice volume, Methane, then I would expect the end result to follow the cycle fairly closely but have greater impacts as the end result. Even the weather will be markedly different.
Setting us up for a 2006/7 style transition into a perfect storm of melting.
Looking at 2007/2012, to me, won't do it. Because, to me, we're not in that cycle. That is to come. The reason we're close to those levels is to do with sequestered heat and CO2 and methane, as I see it. Not because it's some epic melt season in 2016, it wasn't, June and July were nowhere.
Just step way back and look at it in another way. Not in the details, but in broad.
Epic start to the year in spring
Mediocre melt in the high melt time
Miss by a long way for the record.
What follows?
Record lows going into the heart of winter.
Huge melt ponding in the spring
Perfect storm of melting in June/July/August
Or some variation of the kind because we're unlikely to see a 2007 year any time soon as the conditions can't support it. The ice is too fragile, too much heat and moisture is escaping into the weather systems.
But the type of melting year should be close.
I'm going to watch sporadically but it's already unfolding that way.