Climate & Climate Change

DAILY, new evidence emerges to demonstrate that Climate Minister Penny Wong is wrong.

The latest blow to the Government’s apocalyptic prophet is news from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute that there is more ice than normal in the Arctic waters north of the Svalbard archipelago.

According to the Barents Observer there are open areas in this area in most years during July – but this year the area is covered by ice.

A fortnight ago a Norwegian research ship, Lance, and a Swedish ship, MV Stockholm, got stuck in the ice in the area and needed to be freed by the Norwegian Coast Guard.

While one ice floe does not amount to a mini-ice age, the dramatic evidence runs counter to the mantra of the climate warming cult which has claimed the Arctic is becoming progressively free of ice.

The Daily Telegraph, Piers Akerman: Icy reality cools the climate cultists

The New York Times Magazine published a story “Ice Free” by Stephan Faris, hawking his new book “Forecast: The Consequences of Climate Change, From the Amazon to the Arctic, From Darfur to Napa Valley”, to be published in January.

In the article, Faris notes “Greenland’s ice sheet represents one of global warming’s most disturbing threats. The vast expanses of glaciers- massed, on average, 1.6 miles deep – contain enough water to raise sea levels worldwide by 23 feet. Should they melt or otherwise slip into the ocean, they would flood coastal capitals, submerge tropical islands and generally redraw the world’s atlases. The infusion of fresh water could slow or shut down the ocean’s currents, plunging Europe into bitter winter.”

There is little recognition in the media and by the author of history. Greenland actually was warmer in the 1930s and 1940s than it has been in recent decades. For the period from the 1960s to the 1990s, temperatures actually declined significantly as the Atlantic went through its multidecadal cold mode. The temperature changes up and down the last few centuries were closely related to these multidecadal ocean cycles.

Shown below is the temperature plot for Godthab Nuuk in southwest Greenland. Note how closely the temperatures track with the AMO (which is a measure of the Atlantic temperatures 0 to 70N). It shows that cooling from the 1940s to the late 1990s even as greenhouse gases rose steadily, a negative correlation over almost 5 decades. The rise after the middle 1990s was due to the flip of the AMO into its warm phase. They have not reached the level of the 1930s and 1940s.

Temperatures cooled back to the levels of the 1880s by the 1980s and 1990s. In a GRL paper in 2003, Hanna and Cappelen showed a significant cooling trend for eight stations in coastal southern Greenland from 1958 to 2001 (-1.29ºC for the 44 years). The temperature trend represented a strong negative correlation with increasing CO2 levels.

Many recent studies have addressed Greenland ice mass balance. They yield a broad picture of slight inland thickening and strong near-coastal thinning, primarily in the south along fast-moving outlet glaciers. However, interannual variability is very large, driven mainly by variability in summer melting and sudden glacier accelerations. Consequently, the short time interval covered by instrumental data is of concern in separating fluctuations from trends. But in a paper published in Science in February 2007, Dr. Ian Howat of the University of Washington reports that two of the largest glaciers have suddenly slowed, bringing the rate of melting last year down to near the previous rate. At one glacier, Kangerdlugssuaq, “average thinning over the glacier during the summer of 2006 declined to near zero, with some apparent thickening in areas on the main trunk.”

Dr. Howat in a follow-up interview with the New York Times went on to add: “Greenland was about as warm or warmer in the 1930’s and 40’s, and many of the glaciers were smaller than they are now. This was a period of rapid glacier shrinkage world-wide, followed by at least partial re-expansion during a colder period from the 1950’s to the 1980’s. Of course, we don’t know very much about how the glacier dynamics changed then because we didn’t have satellites to observe it. However, it does suggest that large variations in ice sheet dynamics can occur from natural climate variability.” For more on this issue see this full post here. SPPI has also posted a response here. EPW compiled a series of papers here.

Icecap: Greenland Again

During our last check in, we had a look at northern Canada from the Arctic Circle to the North pole, and found we had quite a ways to go before we see an “ice free arctic” this year as some have speculated.

Today I did a check of the NASA rapidfire site for TERRA/MODIS satellite images and grabbed a view showing northern Greenland all the way to the North Pole.

There’s some bergy bits on the northeastern shore of Greenland, but in the cloud free area extending all the way to the pole, it appears to still be solid ice.

With more than half of the summer melt season gone, it looks like an uphill battle for an ice-free arctic this year.

This dovetails with a press release and news story about more ice than normal in the Barents Sea:

The Barents Observer:
http://www.barentsobserver.com/?cat=16149&id=4498513

The Meteorological Institute writes in a press release:

The ice findings from the area spurred surprise among the researchers, many of whom expect the very North Pole to be ice-free by September this year.

Watts Up With That: Polar Ice Check – Still a lot of ice up there

Bernie draws our attention to an article in the Globe and Mail on another break-off of the Ellesmere Island ice shelf:

The Globe and Mail has an excellent map of the “collapse” of this ice sheet. Apparently its collapse has been proceeding for about 100 years.

Update- The break is said to be unprecedented since as long ago as 2005:

Scientists say the break, the largest on record since 2005 but still small when compared with others

This topic is in the news from time to time – there was another similar story in a couple of years ago. At the time, I looked into the matter and wrote several posts on the topic of Ellesmere Island ice shelves, which people interested in this topic may wish to re-visit.

Climate Audit: Ward Hunt Island: Unprecedented since 2005

Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit continues his quest for unarchived and therefore unverifiable data that has been used in numerous millenial temperature reconstructions that produce a ‘Hockey Stick’ shape:

In 2000, Keith Briffa, lead author of the millennial section of AR4, published his own versions of Yamal, Taymir and Tornetrask, all three of which have been staples of all subsequent supposedly “independent” reconstructions. The Briffa version of Yamal has a very pronounced HS and is critical in the modern-medieval differences in several studies. However, the Briffa version for Yamal differs substantially from the version in the publication by the originating authors (Hantemirov, Holocene 2002), but is the one that is used in the multiproxy studies (though it’s hard to tell since Hantemirov is usually cited.) Studies listed in AR4 that use the Briffa versions include not just Briffa 2000, but Mann and Jones 2003, Moberg et al 2005, D’Arrigo et al 2006, Hegerl et al 2007, as well as Osborn and Briffa 2006.

Of the 8 proxies shown in the proxy spaghetti graph (as opposed to the reconstruction spaghetti graph), 3 are from the Briffa 2000 study (called NW Russia, N Russia and N Sweden) but demonstrably the Briffa versions of these sites.

An important characteristic of tree ring chronologies is that they are sensitive to the method used. Chronologies can be quickly and easily calculated from measurement data. Rob Wilson, for example, will nearly always run his own chronologies from measurement data so that he knows for sure how they were done and so that they are done consistently across sites.

Osborn and Briffa 2006 was published in Science, which has a policy requiring the availability of data. It used Briffa’s versions of Yamal, Taymir and Tornetrask. At the time, I requested the measurement data, which had still not been archived 6 years after the original publication of Briffa 2000, despite the availability of excellent international archive facilities at WDCP-A (www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo). Briffa refused. I asked Science to require Briffa to provide the data. After some deliberation, they stated that Osborn and Briffa 2006 had not used the measurement data directly but had only used the chronologies from an earlier study and that I should take up the matter with the author of the earlier study, pointedly not identifying the author, who was, of course, Briffa himself. I wrote Briffa again, this time in his capacity as author of the 2000 article in Quaternary Science Reviews and was blown off.

So years later, the measurement data for key studies used in both canonical multiproxy studies and illustrated in AR4 Box 6.4 Figure 1 (along, remarkably, with Mann’s PC1), remains unarchived, with Briffa resolutely stonewalling efforts to have him archive the data.

But has Briffa, after all these years, finally made a misstep?

Maybe.

Recently Briffa published Briffa et al 2008 in Phil Trans Roy Soc, a journal with a long history, and with a life outside IPCC. A reader drew my attention to the fact that Phil Trans Roy Soc has a clear and forthright policy. As I reported a little while ago, I wrote to them observing that Briffa had not observed their requirements on data availability and that their editors and reviewers had failed to require observance of a data archiving policy that would require provision of a url as a condition of publication. My letter was as follows:

Dear Sirs,

Your policy on data availability as stated at: publishing.royalsociety.org/index.cfm?page=1684#question10 states:

“As a condition of acceptance authors agree to honour any reasonable request by other researchers for materials, methods, or data necessary to verify the conclusion of the article.

Supplementary data up to 10Mb is placed on the Society’s website free of charge and is publicly accessible. Large datasets must be deposited in a recognised public domain database by the author prior to submission. The accession number should be provided for inclusion in the published article.”

Briffa et al failed to comply with your requirement that “large datasets must be deposited in a recognised public domain database by the author prior to submission” and your editorial staff and reviewers failed to ensure that the article included an accession number for such deposit.

In particular, Briffa et al. 2008 discussed the following tree ring measurement data sets which have not been archived at the International Tree Ring Data Bank or other public domain data base (other than a small subset of the Tornetrask data set.) Would you therefore please provide me with either a URL or the complete tree ring measurement data sets in digital form for all data sets discussed in Briffa et al 2008, including Yamal, Tornetrask, Taymyr, Bolshoi Avam and Finnish Lapland, together with digital versions of the individual reconstuctions referred to in Briffa et al 2008, including, without limitation, the reconstructions for each of the above sites and the composite regional reconstructions referred to in the article. This informaiton is necessary to “verify the conclusion of the article”.

Yours truly,

Stephen McIntyre

Last week, I received a cordial replying undertaking to look into the matter and stating:

“We take matters like this very seriously and I am sorry that this was not picked up in the publishing process.”

Imagine that. A journal that seems to have both a data policy and that takes it seriously. Unlike, say, Science or Nature, which have refused to make similar requirements of IPCC authors. On the face of it, a real science journal. That’s right: Real. Science.

However, Briffa is a wily data stonewalling veteran and may yet outwit the editors of Phil Trans Roy Soc. We shall see.

I suspect that Briffa won’t be able to pull off the same stunt that he pulled at Science, where he was able to use the prior publication of the data elsewhere as a pretext for not archiving the data in accordance with Science’s policies. Look at what Phil Trans Roy Soc says about publishing data in more than one place:

“It is important to ensure that research work is only published once. If it is published more than once, the scientific literature can be unjustifiably weighted by the appearance that one study has been replicated. It might also mean that the study is inadvertently entered twice into a meta-analysis, for example, or cause problems in systems which use the number of publications to assess an individual’s or an institute’s research output.”

There may be situations (e.g. review articles) where previously published work can be included in summary form, but it must be made clear to the Editor on submission that this is the case.

Imagine if that policy were applied in paleoclimate. How many times have we seen the same proxies re-cycled as a supposedly “independent” result. Look at the above sentence:

“If it is published more than once, the scientific literature can be unjustifiably weighted by the appearance that one study has been replicated.”

Precisely. If that were applied to the Team (Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick Team), they’d be out of business.

Climate Audit: Is Briffa Finally Cornered?

A pdf copy of Ian Wilson’s talk to the Lavoisier Group AGM (11th July 2008) in Melbourne, Australia, is posted at:

http://www.lavoisier.com.au/papers/articles/IanwilsonForum2008.pdf

Ian Wilson was born in Ipswich , QLD, in 1955. He graduated in physics from the UNE in 1977 and obtained his PhD in astronomy in 1982 from the ANU, having worked at the Mt. Stromlo & Siding Spring Observatories.

He was subsequently a Junior Research Fellow at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, a Research Fellow at Harvard, Ass. Professor at the Universities of Toledo and Oklahoma , and Operations Astronomer at the Hubble Space Institute in Baltimore MD.

Since 1995 he has taught science and mathematics in Queensland and is now teaching in Toowoomba.

New data shows that Bangladesh’s landmass is increasing, contradicting forecasts that the South Asian nation will be under the waves by the end of the century, experts say.

Scientists from the Dhaka-based Center for Environment and Geographic Information Services (CEGIS) have studied 32 years of satellite images and say Bangladesh’s landmass has increased by 20 square kilometres (eight square miles) annually.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has predicted that impoverished Bangladesh, criss-crossed by a network of more than 200 rivers, will lose 17 percent of its land by 2050 because of rising sea levels due to global warming.

Director of the US-based NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, professor James Hansen, paints an even grimmer picture, predicting the entire country could be under water by the end of the century.

AFP/Yahoo News: Bangladesh gaining land, not losing: scientists

A new paper by Demetris Koutsoyiannis et al has been published, which demonstrates that climate models have no predictive value. The full paper entitled, ‘On the Credibility of Climate Predictions’ is published in the Journal of Hydrological Sciences, and is available for free download. 18 years of climate model predictions for temperature and precipitation at 8 locations worldwide were evaluated.

The Abstract states:

Geographically distributed predictions of future climate, obtained through climate models, are widely used in hydrology and many other disciplines, typically without assessing their reliability. Here we compare the output of various models to temperature and precipitation observations from eight stations with long (over 100 years) records from around the globe. The results show that models perform poorly, even at a climatic (30-year) scale. Thus local model projections cannot be credible, whereas a common argument that models can perform better at larger spatial scales is unsupported.

Hat tip to Climate Audit

I was interviewed by journalist John Stewart on ABC TV’s Lateline program tonight.

The segment was about global warming with a focus on blogging.

Mr Stewart made the claim that the only place where the science is still debated is on the internet amongst bloggers. In fact we were accused of still “attacking” the science of global warming.

Interestingly Andrew Bolt was not described as one a News Ltd columnist but rather as a skeptic and a blogger. He was shown making the point that there has been no increase in global temperatures for ten years.

I was also as described as a blogger and also shown making the point that over the last 10 years it hasn’t got any warmer.

If Mr Stewart had gone to the trouble of checking the internationally recognised sources of real world (as opposed to computer generated) data on global temperatures he would have been able to confirm that what Mr Bolt and I said was correct: there has been no warming over the last ten years.

Monthly globally averaged lower atmospheric temperature anomaly since 1979 as measured by NOAA and NASA satellites.
With the additional mark up from gorelied.blogspot.com, with thanks.

Even James Hansen’s GISS data shows that global temperatures have plateued, if not cooled over the last ten years.

NASA GISS Monthly Mean Surface Temperature Analysis since 1998

But instead of the news program confirming our pronouncements with reference to the data (as they might on a business program), I was accused of “spreading doubt about the world getting hotter”.

Graeme Pearman was then introduced, not as a warmaholic, but as a former CSIRO scientist, with Mr Stewart explaining that he believed the data from the Hadley Centre in the UK provided no evidence that the world is getting cooler. [So does this mean the world might not be getting warmer?]

Monthly near-surface from 1850, from the Hadley Centre

Direct comment from Dr Pearman then followed in which he appeared to avoid reference to global temperatures instead making comment about temperatures in Australia – but the average viewer probably thought he was referring to global temperatures.

I did get to make two final important points: 1. that Climate Change Minister, Penny Wong, should look at the global temperature data and, 2. that it was wrong for the Minister to suggest, as she did recently with the release of the green paper on emissions trading, that 12 of the last 13 years have been the warmest in history.

This is indeed an outrageous claim with the Minister ignoring much of geological history.

The Minister might have got away with saying that of the last 150 years, the last 13 have been relatively warm. But to suggest that 12 of the last 13 are the hottest ever is just plain wrong. Whatever happened to the medieval warm period, not to mention that planet earth is very old – in fact about 4,550 million years old.

Of course the earth’s climate has always changed and continents have moved, mountain ranges formed and when continents have pulled apart huge quantities of volcanic water, carbon dioxide and methane have been released into the atmosphere.

Don’t forget that just 120 million years ago Australia was at the South Pole but it wasn’t cold. Global sea levels were about 100 metres higher than at present and the sea surface temperature was 10-15C higher than now. Indeed parts of inland Australian were once covered in a shallow tropical sea.

The Lateline segment finished with John Stewart stating that we, the bloggers, aren’t going to go away. He has got that bit right.

I would have like to have made a couple of additional points, ten years is not a very long period of time, but there is now a breakdown in what was a close correlation for about 30 years between increasing levels of carbon dioxide and increasing global temperatures.

It may of course start warming again next year – but a recent paper in the journal Nature suggests global temperatures may now plateau until at least 2015 – that is there may be no more warming for a few years.

Of course it is worth remembering that there has been a general warming trend for the last 18,000 years and over this period sea levels have risen about 100 metres.

All in all I think John Stewart did a pretty good job with a difficult topic.

In fact, I’m hoping he will now become a regular reader of blogs and start checking the temperature data and pondering the difference between correlation and causation with us.

Cyclone Nargis – of course it’s easier to read a graph than a cyclone.

Update
A video clip of the segment is now here: http://www.abc.net.au/news/video/2008/07/29/2318074.htm