Month: January 2026

Arctic Ice Recovering 2025 Yearend

Posted on by Ron Clutz

The Arctic ice extents are now fully reported for 2025, ending the year below average despite a higher rate of growth through December.

Note MASIE 2025 started 1M km2 (or 1 Wadham) below the 19 year average, but cut the deficit to 428k km2, or a gap of 3%. SII v.4 tracked lower than MASIE during December, drawing closer the last week. The chart below shows the distribution of ice extent across the Arctic regions at yearend 2025.

Region 2025365 Day 365 Average 2025-Ave. 2024365 2025-2024
 (0) Northern_Hemisphere 12611676 13039302 -427626 12435177 176499
 (1) Beaufort_Sea 1071070 1070458 612 1071001 69
 (2) Chukchi_Sea 966006 964771 1235 965989 17
 (3) East_Siberian_Sea 1087137 1087133 4 1087137 0
 (4) Laptev_Sea 897845 897841 4 897845 0
 (5) Kara_Sea 867623 887208 -19585 876527 -8904
 (6) Barents_Sea 254882 423978 -169096 345715 -90832
 (7) Greenland_Sea 668550 595658 72891 574537 94013
 (8) Baffin_Bay_Gulf_of_St._Lawrence 768306 982649 -214343 982716 -214409
 (9) Canadian_Archipelago 854931 853618 1313 854878 53
 (10) Hudson_Bay 1256284 1215695 40589 922416 333868
 (11) Central_Arctic 3174354 3206560 -32206 3207164.49 -32811
 (12) Bering_Sea 350519 403002 -52483 325489.93 25029
 (13) Baltic_Sea 14031 31873 -17843 15271.77 -1241
 (14) Sea_of_Okhotsk 366812 393742 -26929 302941 63871

The major deficits are in Barents Sea and Baffin Bay (Atlantic basins), along with smaller losses in Bering and Okhotsk (Pacific basins).

Background from Previous Post Updated to Year-End 2025

Some years ago reading a thread on global warming at WUWT, I was struck by one person’s comment: “I’m an actuary with limited knowledge of climate metrics, but it seems to me if you want to understand temperature changes, you should analyze the changes, not the temperatures.” That rang bells for me, and I applied that insight in a series of Temperature Trend Analysis studies of surface station temperature records. Those posts are available under this heading. Climate Compilation Part I Temperatures

This post seeks to understand Arctic Sea Ice fluctuations using a similar approach: Focusing on the rates of extent changes rather than the usual study of the ice extents themselves. Fortunately, Sea Ice Index (SII) from NOAA provides a suitable dataset for this project. As many know, SII relies on satellite passive microwave sensors to produce charts of Arctic Ice extents with complete coverages going back to 1989.  Version 3 was more closely aligned than Version 4 with MASIE, the modern form of Naval ice charting in support of Arctic navigation. The SII User Guide is here.

There are statistical analyses available, and the one of interest (table below) is called Sea Ice Index Rates of Change (here). As indicated by the title, this spreadsheet consists not of monthly extents, but changes of extents from the previous month. Specifically, a monthly value is calculated by subtracting the average of the last five days of the previous month from this month’s average of final five days. So the value presents the amount of ice gained or lost during the present month.

These monthly rates of change have been compiled into a baseline for the period 1980 to 2010, which shows the fluctuations of Arctic ice extents over the course of a calendar year. Below is a graph of those averages of monthly changes up to and including this year. Those familiar with Arctic Ice studies will not be surprised at the sine wave form. December end is a relatively neutral point in the cycle, midway between the September Minimum and March Maximum.

The graph makes evident the six spring/summer months of melting and the six autumn/winter months of freezing.  Note that June-August produce the bulk of losses, while October-December show the bulk of gains. Also the peak and valley months of March and September show very little change in extent from beginning to end.

The table of monthly data reveals the variability of ice extents over the last 4 decades, with gains in blue cells and losses in red cells.

The values in January show changes from the end of the previous December, and by summing twelve consecutive months we can calculate an annual rate of change for the years 1980 to 2025.

As many know, there has been a decline of Arctic ice extent over these 40 years, averaging 70k km2 per year. But year over year, the changes shift constantly between gains and losses, ranging up to +/- 500k km2, (2024 being exceptional). Since 1989 the average yearend gain/loss is nearly zero, -0.049k km2 to be exact.

Moreover, it seems random as to which months are determinative for a given year. For example, much ado was printed about 2023 losing more ice than usual June through September. But then the final 3 months of 2023 more than made up for those summer losses, resulting in a sizeable gain for the year.

As it happens in this dataset, October has the highest rate of adding ice. The table below shows the variety of monthly rates in the record as anomalies from the 1980-2010 baseline. In this exhibit a red cell is a negative anomaly (less than baseline for that month) and blue is positive (higher than baseline).

Note that the  +/ –  rate anomalies are distributed all across the grid, sequences of different months in different years, with gains and losses offsetting one another.  As noted earlier,  in 2023 the outlier negative months were June through September where unusual amounts of ice were lost.  Then unusally strong gains in October to December resulted in a large annual gain, compared to the baseline. The bottom line presents the average anomalies for each month over the period 1979-2025.  Note the rates of gains and losses mostly offset, and the average of all months in the bottom right cell is virtually zero.

A final observation: The graph below shows the Yearend Arctic Ice Extents for the last 35 years.

Year-end Arctic ice extents (last 5 days of December) show three distinct regimes: 1989-1998, 1998-2010, 2010-2025. The average year-end extent 1989-2010 is 13.4M km2. In the last decade, 2011 was 13.0M km2, and six years later, 2017 was 12.3M km2. 2021 rose back to 13.0  2024 slipped back to 12.2M, and 2025 is back up to 12.4M. So for all the the fluctuations, the net is virually zero, or a loss of one tenth of a Wadham (0.1M) from 2010. Talk of an Arctic ice death spiral is fanciful.

These data show a noisy, highly variable natural phenomenon. Clearly, unpredictable factors are in play, principally water structure and circulation, atmospheric circulation regimes, and also incursions and storms. And in the longer view, today’s extents are not unusual.

 

 

 

 

Six Impossible Climate Things to Believe

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Image created with ChatGPT.

Javier Vinós provides the list in his yearend Clintel post Six Impossible Things to Believe.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Like Alice’s White Queen, European and Spanish authorities
want us to believe six impossible things about
climate change and the energy transition.

In Alice Through the Looking-Glass, a character by Lewis Carroll says, “One can’t believe impossible things,” to which the White Queen replies, “When I was your age, I sometimes believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Like Alice’s White Queen, European and Spanish authorities want us to believe six impossible things about climate change and the energy transition, before and after breakfast. These six impossible things to believe — and yet many people, like the White Queen, do believe them — are as follows:

The first is believing that humans have — or could have in the near future — some degree of control over the climate and the weather, and that through our actions we can reduce the frequency and intensity of hurricanes, floods, droughts, or sea-level rise. Anyone who believes this is capable of believing anything.

The second is believing that the climate, in its extraordinary complexity with hundreds — perhaps thousands — of variables, is controlled by just one: changes in the concentration of greenhouse gases. The theory and models that propose this are based on a good understanding of the properties of CO₂, but a poor understanding of the other climatic variables. And the fact that no solid evidence for this theory has emerged, despite decades of intensive searching, makes it very difficult to believe.

The third is believing that an energy transition is taking place or will take place. There are no examples of energy transitions. We use more biomass, coal, oil, natural gas, and uranium than at any other time in history, and we are simply adding the so-called renewable energies, which are installed, maintained, and replaced thanks to hydrocarbon fuels. Our energy use is growing faster than our capacity to install renewable energy. The transition is a myth, and anyone who claims to believe in it is either lying or poorly informed.

The fourth is believing that the use of hydrocarbon fuels is going to be .abandoned At the recent climate conference in Brazil, a group of countries, including Spain, pushed for the agreement to include a roadmap for abandoning those fuels. They were forced to back down, and hydrocarbon fuels are not even mentioned in the final agreement. Eighty-three governments supported that roadmap, but together they represent only 13.6% of the world’s population. The remaining 86.4% shows no intention of abandoning the source from which the human species obtains 85% of its external energy.

It is impossible to believe that such an abandonment will take place because, 33 years after the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and 10 years after the Paris Agreement, support among nations for abandoning hydrocarbon fuels has decreased rather than increased.

The fifth is believing that a reduction in global CO₂ emissions will occur. These emissions are linked to human development and population growth. Many regions of the planet remain underdeveloped, and the world’s population will continue to grow in the coming decades.

Since the first climate conference in Berlin in 1995, where strict emission-reduction commitments were adopted — but only for “developed” nations — global CO₂ emissions have increased by 70%. These 30 years should be enough to convince anyone that they are not going to stop rising.

The Fantasy

The sixth is believing that energy can be decarbonized. Only 23% of the EU’s final energy consumption is electricity, and only 70% of that electricity comes from carbon-free sources. One third of it comes from nuclear energy, which Spain rejects and which was installed in the last century. So far this century, the EU has managed to decarbonize less than 10% of the energy it uses. Most of the planet is not even trying.

These six things are impossible to believe, but if we refuse to believe even just one of them, the entire climate and energy strategy of the European Union and the Spanish government is revealed as a tragic farce. Based on these impossibilities, our national and European governments have committed themselves to a transition whose consequences we are already suffering:

♦  more expensive energy,
♦  declining industrial production and competitiveness,
♦  increased risk to the power grid,
♦  environmental policies with tragic consequences,
♦  greater indebtedness, and, ultimately,
♦  an accelerated decline of Europe relative to the rest of the world.