The Patriot Post® · Major Arctic Sea Ice Story Lurking, but Is Anyone Watching?

There is a huge event being forecasted this year by the CFSV2, and I don’t know if anyone else is mentioning this. For the first time in over a decade, the Arctic sea ice anomaly in the summer is forecast to be near or above normal for a time! While it has approached the normals at the end of the winter season a couple of times because of new ice growth, this signals something completely different – that multiyear growth means business – and it shows the theory on the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) is likely to be on target. Once it flips, this red herring of climate panic will be gone. Global and Southern Hemisphere anomalies are already unmentionable since the former is well above normal and the latter is routinely busting daily records.

But the correlation is startlingly simple. The cold AMO came to an end in the mid-1990s. The Pacific Decadol Oscillation (PDO) was warm, so the globe was warming, but the Arctic ice cap is mainly landlocked from the Pacific. Therefore, the melting was not terrific, and it was the Atlantic that was the big deal. A picture is worth a thousand words, so to save at least that many: 

The biggest minimum anomalies are in the summer since this flipped, and the only peaks came very close to the height of winters once this melting was underway.

Now look at what the CFSV2 forecasted for 2012.

The brief positive anomaly hit early, but for the summer it’s well below normal. In 2013, it’s the same, though not as far.

But this year it’s forecast to be around normal in August!

This is only with a yearly AMO back off. I don’t think this is the real deal of the flip yet. But it makes the point that one can correlate the ice in the Arctic with the Atlantic cycle.

If we look at the cold AMO years we can plainly see why this is going on.

 Now look at what happened when the AMO turned warm.

 What is the logical conclusion of what will happen to Arctic sea ice once the AMO turns permanently cold? (Right now, like the Pacific warm spike, I think we are in a yearly reversal in the middle of the decadol trend. This is similar to the late 1950s.)

The Jamstec model is forecasting water temps this summer to be much colder in the north Atlantic than the map above. but still not cold enough to say this is the permanent flip. It is, however, a sign of what is to come.

It should be obvious as to who is the boss here, and with the warm AMO in its waning years, the Arctic sea ice hysteria will wind up where so many agenda driven items do – on the ash heap of history.

This, if correct, is going to be a huge story. It would be the first summer where Arctic sea ice returned to near normal, indicative of the increase in multiyear ice and what a turn to the colder AMO in the future means! Let’s see if anyone else picks up on it.

By the way, this same kind of evolution through the fall and into the winter would lead to another harsh U.S. winter.

Joe Bastardi is chief forecaster at WeatherBELL Analytics, a meteorological consulting firm.