“University of Washington climate scientist Mark Albright was dismissed from his position as associate state climatologist, just weeks after exposing false claims of shrinking glaciers in the Cascade Mountains.
“Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels had asserted in a February 7 Seattle Times editorial, “the average snow pack in the Cascades has declined 50 percent since 1950 and will be cut in half again in 30 years if we don’t start addressing the problems of climate change now.”
“Albright knew from his research that the Cascade Mountains snow pack had not declined anywhere near what Nickels asserted, and that the snow pack has actually been growing in recent years.
Read the complete article by James Taylor at the Heartland Institute website: http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=21207
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
“After reviewing the data, Hartmann concluded on February 22, “While some stations show a 50 percent downward trend in April 1 snow water equivalent between 1950 and present, we believe the overall observed trend for the Cascade Mountains of Washington and Oregon is smaller.
“One set of observations using all of the Cascade mountain stations in Washington State … from 1945 until the present shows a snow water equivalent decrease of about 30 percent,” Hartmann noted. “If an earlier starting date is chosen, the trend is smaller, but the number of stations available before 1945 is relatively small and their average altitude is high.
“If a shorter record is chosen, starting in about 1975 for example, there is a small increase in snow water equivalent,” Hartmann concluded (emphasis added).”
They are both guilty of cherry picking, it appears.
From the linked article
“Anytime politics intrudes on science, science is degraded and society as a whole is the loser,” said Sterling Burnett, senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis. “That is why the whole global warming issue is a mess right now. Scientists have not reached a scientific conclusion yet, but the politicians want to jump the gun and be seen as saviors on the issue. This is a recipe for disaster.”
The climate debate will be resolved eventually; the outcome will be one of: (a) the end of all things, (b) Y2K revisited, or (c) something in between. (That was profound, but wait, there’s more).
Whatever the result, science stands to lose a great deal. Outcome (a) will see us enter a new dark age where we will fight for survival against cockroaches, both human and insect varieties, so science won’t get much airplay under that scenario. (b) Sees science reduced, in the eyes of the public who are expected to pay for it, to the level of Saturday morning television, but demonstrably harmful. On the upside, at least 90% of us won’t die in one catastrophic decade, which would be nice. (c) Sees the outcome for (b) but with much more confusion, a lot of wasted resources as we go off half-cocked, and a worse climate result than if we had all thought more and shouted less back in the 1990’s and 2000’s.
All issues, without exception, that raise our collective blood pressure, become yesterday’s news eventually. Everything has its day. Unless outcome (a) comes to pass, and only a complete idiot would wish for that (“See! See! I TOLD you so, but would you LISTEN?!), we will look back on this squabble as largely a waste of time and energy. And if (a) is our fate, given the non-linear effect of CO2 on greenhouse warming, it’s already too late, so our goose is just past well done.
So Sterling Burnett hit the nail on the head. Unfortunately this is a super B-double load of eggs that cannot be unscrambled. I try to focus on the good that will come, like a rational energy policy with a longer-term focus, and clean coal-fired power stations. That will be good whether it’s outcome (b) or (c), because without energy, you got nothin’.
Lucky he wasn’t an organic farmer – Schiller would have recommended hanging.
As usual it’s more complex than we’dike to think…
http://www.cses.washington.edu/cig/outreach/newsletter.shtml
On February 24, 2007, The Oregonian reported on a debate between researchers at the University of Washington on recent trends in 20th century snowpack in the Washington Cascades. The issue originated with the publication of an op-ed written by the Mayor of Seattle on February 7 stating that “The average snowpack in the Cascades has declined 50 percent since 1950…”. In question was the 50% statistic for the Cascades and the implication that the reported decline was due entirely to anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change; the 50% figure had appeared, erroneously, in the June 2004 report “Scientific Consensus Statement on the Likely Impacts of Climate Change on the Pacific Northwest” (Oregon State University). Mark Albright, of UW Atmospheric Sciences, noted that at the most complete snow courses (a small subset of the total) for the Cascades, the last 10 years were only a little below the long-term average.
To help resolve questions over the statement, a group of University of Washington climate and weather scientists met to review the different statistical approaches used to examine trends in spring snowpack, also referred to as snow water equivalent or SWE. Professor Dennis Hartmann, the Chairman of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences, was asked to prepare a summary statement on the issue. The statement reiterated many of the CIG’s research findings on trends in SWE and added additional important insights into recent trends. In summary:
20th century snowpack trends. CIG research shows that Pacific Northwest SWE has declined since monitoring became widespread in the late 1940s, with 30-60% losses at many *individual* monitoring sites in the Cascades (Mote 2003, Mote et al. 2005). When looking at the period 1950-1997, the overall observed decline in April 1 SWE for the Cascades is -29% (Mote et al. 2005). Relative losses are greatest in lower and mid-elevations where mid-winter temperatures are warmer; higher elevation sites where average mid-winter temperatures are still well below freezing (even with 20th century warming) don’t show any declines in SWE.
An examination of SWE trends for more recent years (e.g., beginning about 1975 or later) appears to show a small increase in SWE for the Cascades, consistent with Albright’s finding about the average of the last 10 years, though SWE in the last five to seven years has been at least 20% below the long-term mean. This leveling of the trend appears to be associated with increased precipitation in the late 1990s, especially the near-record wet winter of 1998-99, and appears to have temporarily offset the persistent declines produced at low elevations by warming. Trends over intervals as short as 30 years are rarely significant, given the shorter time frame and the higher precipitation and snowpack variability experienced in the PNW since the mid-1970s. In other words, the apparent leveling of trends appears to be the result of large natural variability in precipitation masking the declines driven by temperature.
Data availability. Data availability is a limiting factor in long-term SWE trends analysis. Prior to the mid-1940s, there were very few snowpack monitoring sites with continuous data sets and those that had continuous data sets tended to be located at high altitudes known to be less sensitive to warming trends. These factors make it difficult to assess SWE trends before the 1940s with high statistical certainty, and results are not consistent with more complete analyses for later periods because of the high elevation bias in the available data. By mid-century, the availability of data and distribution of snowpack monitoring stations is much improved, allowing for a more robust analysis of SWE trends. “A substantial collection of snow course data records with a reasonably representative and stable distribution with altitude exists since about 1945,” notes Prof. Hartmann.
The role of natural variability. Natural variability has played – and will continue to play – an important role in determining year-to-year and decade-to-decade variability in SWE. Mote 2006 found that natural variability as represented by the North Pacific Index (NPI) explains about 50% of the trends in Pacific Northwest SWE since mid-century (and less from earlier starting points). The remaining portion of the trend “clearly includes the influence of the monotonic warming observed throughout the West, which is largely unrelated to Pacific climate variability and may well represent human influence on climate” (p.6219). Natural variability has also played a role in 20th century Pacific Northwest temperature trends, explaining perhaps one-third of November-March warming in the region since 1920 (Mote et al. 2005, p.47).
As noted above, natural variability will continue to be a factor in 21st century snowpack accumulation. The Pacific Northwest will have good snowpack years in the coming decades as well as poor snowpack years even as the long-term temperature trends continue. This natural variability can hide long-term trends over short periods of time. Additionally, the potential for increases in precipitation as a result of climate change may make it difficult to see distinct trends in the near-term.
Future impacts. The warming projected for the 21st century is expected to have a significant negative impact on snowpack, particularly mid-elevation snowpack, even if increased precipitation from natural variability and/or climate change is enough to “hold off” the impacts of warmer temperatures on snowpack in the near term. Changes in 21st century precipitation are less certain than temperature, however. Given that approximately 50% of the snowpack in the Cascades sits below 4200 feet, where spring snowpack is very sensitive to small increases in average temperature, preparing for climate change impacts is critical.
Long term temperature trends are computer models of climate – which is essentially impossible to model.
However there also many who actually believe that economic activity can also be modelled but it can also be shown that is as much a fantasy as climate modelling. We now know that no Keynsian economist has ever made an accurate prediction of economic performance.
The crucial fact is that both attempts to model chaotic non-linear systems are made by the progressives or lefties or, more accurately, statists.
The upshot is that if, and it is a big if, we actually sign Kyoto, then that means our behaviour has to be micromanaged to ensure traty oblications. My parents fought a war to rid civilisation of this type of human organisation.
It seems they might have won a battle but the war remains.
Waht Luke and his followers want is a totalitarian state in which our behaviour is prescribed and proscribed to the edicts of the Carbon God.
Note the reference to their record wet season of 1998/99 that coincided with our record El Nino dry season.
As usual, SJT is trying to tar both camps with the same brush, as “cherry picking”. This is bollocks as the Albright camp have added missing information, the absence of which in the Mayor’s statement, rendered his statement false and misleading. The original selective delivery of data was the cherry picking because it, and it alone, determined what needed to be added by Albright to present a true and fair view.
Meanwhile, the coal industry starts to realise it is caught up in a feedback loop.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/business/rio-to-cut-coal-jobs-as-drought-bites-into-power/2007/05/16/1178995236604.html
“RIO Tinto is to halve production of energy coal and cut 160 jobs at its Tarong mine in south-eastern Queensland, after water shortages caused an adjacent power station to cut output.
Production would drop to 300,000 tonnes a month from 605,000 tonnes, Alison Smith, a spokeswoman for the company, said in a statement. The cuts follow measures taken at the Tarong and Tarong North power stations to cut water use during the drought.”
What have you got to say about that, Mr Morgan? Maybe if you should put the rain on an AWA?
Ian,
did you read all of Luke’s post? Albright didn’t add anything, he just picked a different cherry off the tree. The snow is being reduced by a large extent at lower altitudes, if you stick to the higher altitudes, it’s not being reduced as much.
I can add a note from personal experience of this region. In the mid-1960s I was a graduate student at the University of Washington in Seattle. Over the summer of 1965/6 my wife and I lived at the University’s experimental forest in the foothills of the Cascades and every weekend we would go “bushwalking” in the mountains. This was very beautiful country with tall coniferous forests, rushing creeks, glimmering lakes, meadows of wildflowers and snowy uplands. There were real glaciers on the sides of the old volcanic peaks such as Mt Rainier. My wife and I walked up to the “snouts” of two glaciers. They were melting steadily, and had been doing so for the previous thousands of years. The melting on one of these glaciers had left a labyrnth of ice caves, into which you could walk, and actually watch the icemelt running away downhill. The paths of the retreating glaciers could be easily traced as we hiked up the steep valleys they had gouged, and the evolution of the flora in their wake was extremely interesting. In those days, there was no talk of global warming. The excepted wisdom was that the melting glaciers were the remnants of the retreating ice from the previous ice age. Somehow or other this idea has been overtaken in the last decade and replaced by anthropogenic warming.
Roger Underwood
Roger
the glaciers have been melting. The research has shown the rate of melting has accelerate, that’s the difference.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=129
Maybe if Wayne Goss and his chief of staff Kevin Rudd has authorised the construction of THAT dam in the 80’s, the Power stations in SE Queensland would still be working at 100% and coal mines would be operating, with or without AWAs 🙂
But of course the NIMBY syndrome is very powerful. The locals definitely didn’t want Wolfdene. The current locals definitely don’t want Traveston or Tilley’s Bridge. The Moggill locals don’t want the Ipswich motorway extensions. Nobody wants anything in their backyard.
And Goss lost government on the Koala Highway (ill-fated proposed Gold Coast route east of current upgraded M1).
Would Wolfdene have made that much difference. Not a lot.
The drought is off the scale. But it’s the drought we had to have !
The public didn’t give a hoot when Wivenhoe was full.
I suspect that much of the alarming reports we hear aboiut climate change and impending disaster serves as political red herrings to distract us from what is really being undermined by our political operators. Adelaide university’s Professor Plimer puts our feeble efforts at controlling the universe into perspective when he claims that “If ice falls into the ocean in icebergs that’s due to the processes thousands of years ago” Read the entire article at .
Lorette,
no one is trying to control the universe. Just what we are doing.
Luke, some times you talk just so much male cow manure, that its unbelievable.
You know that the coral cores tell us that we have had MUCH WORSE droughts, quite recently, probably when that bloke Cook was sailing around here.
The Wolfdene dam would not have done any good, not because of any drought, but because it was a stupid place for a dam. It would have been a shallow puddle with an evaporation rate greater than the now closing power plants.
It would have put a few of feet in the river at my bottom paddock, 46 Km up stream from the wall. Great place for a dam.
In fact, about as good as Traveston. It will have water, only for a short period after a flood. Its catchment, & evaporation rate will make sure that its useless in “normal” years.
The 36 months, up to November 2006, had above average rainfall in most of the Albert catchment.
I take the readings for a bit of it. Its only since that fool Beattie started blithering about “the worst drought in a century” that its caught up with us, here. In fact 2005, & 2006 are 2 of the only 3 years in the last 15, that the river has not stopped flowing in late winter/early spring.
However, that would not have had any effect on supplying Brisbane. Apart from the very ocasional flood, I can normally jump across the river with out getting my feet wet. I am 67!
Luke, get real, & try talking some sense, you’ll get much further than you do with this stupid dogma.
Bollocks, SJT. Lukes additional information did not negate what Albright said, it merely added to it. Albright added information to the Mayors statement that contradicted the Mayors claim.
And reasonable men and women have every right to know that the past 35 years of a 55 year data set exhibits a modest increase in snowpack. It is a pity you don’t respect that right.
What I would like to know is why the Wolfdene option is not being reviewed? There has been no major urban development in the area and it is still the best location. And it is not as if going back on one’s word is anathema to Beattie. Last year the Wolfdene catchment had 1240mm of rain, some drought, Luke.
Dear SJT,
I am interested to know how the rate of glacier melt is known over the centuries. What was going on, for example, during the warm period of the Middle Ages? If the current rate of melting is “accellerating” as you suggest, this implies that we knew what the past rate was and can make a comparison of rates over time.
Roger Underwood
“Anytime politics intrudes on science, science is degraded and society as a whole is the loser,” said Sterling Burnett, senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis.
Sounds a lot like the Australian Environment Foundation’s goals to me.
oh the irony
What I find really sad in this is that the reason that Albright was cashiered was not because he in any way doubted “global warming” or the consensus line, but because he questioned the accuracy of what was borne out to be politicised “pseudo-science”.
The fact that he embarrassed the State climatologist (his boss) and the Mayor (a Democrat), and maybe because he gloated a bit too much after the fact, obviously did not help his case. 🙂
Are these the portents of the society that is going to be forced on us if we give in to the hysteria? 🙁
cheers
Arnost
Friends, colleagues and admirers;
Hasbo – welcome back – I didn’t say anything about coral cores or climate change – just that the current drought is off the meter on our bit over 100 years European climate data. And it wasn’t a big dam so it wouldn’t get us out of trouble. My recurrent theme is that whinge we might – we get what we deserve as modern metros: no planning on water, electricity, roads, children’s services and health. You need a good crisis and wire brush and dettol job to have a wakeup moment.
Intellectual giants like yourself and Motty would have seen all this of course and convinced the electorate what they needed to do. Behaviour would willingly be changed, driveways brushed not hosed, and we would willingly sacrifice our precious valleys for dams – actually we would queue up to offer them to be inundated ! We would all volunteer to increase our charges for basic services and volunteer extra tax dollars for our infrastructure.
Besides I heard the drinking recycled water is like drinking tiger urine. Really gets you going and puts some rock hard zing in your day. I’m looking forward to it. What doesn’t kill ya makes you stronger.
Back on the lead post – and thinking about the recent Ness-Newmont travesty – maybe Albright was a bad bugger – or maybe his part-time contract just ran out. Do we really know? Wouldn’t want to get sued for not having the facts would we? (that’s by either side).
And just for Hasy-wasy – as I have said you can make both a natural variability and a climate change argument for this drought. You do have processes at work (observations) that have an AGW explanation. And nobody says you can’t have BOTH – natural variability doesn’t disappear necessarily just because have climate change.
Indeed the science review looking at this controversy – the subject of this storm-in-a-teapot post indeed shows that you probably have AGW and natural variability at work. Just like with hurricane Katrina and other phenomena.
Also of interest is that coral cores off the Burdekin coast are a tad aways from Brissy. And isn’t north Qld a bit wet at the moment? So yea valid snippet the old coral cores but doesn’t necessarily correlate with everywhere including the back of Esk. Actually SEQ doesn’t correlate with the rest of Queensland very well at all – it’s its own little climate zone. Lucky us. Face it Has-machine – unlike myself – you’re biased. 🙂
And that’s why we should keep the flag the same. So there !
Totally OT, but there’s a major rain event happening as we speak in western NSW. Some places have already got well over 60mm and it’s expected to continue for a bit. It’s really good news for a lot of folk out there.
TC Pierre (newly formed between PNG and Solomons) is heading west and may result in a major rain event in FNQ.
However don’t know if any of this will get to SE Qld.
By the way, did you know that there was a record just set where there was no named Tropical Storm (let alone a Cyclone/Hurricane) anywhere in the world for something like 40 days! Previous record was 31 days in 1984.
cheers
Arnost
Roger
did you read the link to the research Real Climate is using as the basis for it’s claims? I think you will find all the answers to your questions in there.
Despite our intellectual (?) jousting on the causes of droughts and global climate anomalies perhaps we should spare a few moments to contemplate the mood of those enduring it for real.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200705/s1925780.htm
Aaron – hope some of that rain front delivers out west and that TC Pierre comes in over Double Island point in Queensland and it pisses down for a week.
Sorry rain news attributed to Arnost more correctly. My apologies.
The long story.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003618979_warming15m.html
That news article that SJT just linked is an indictment. We have gone from 50% decline to 30% decline. Somebody is saving face.
My take on this is that IF there was a 30% decline from 1945 to present, and IF there was no change or a slight increase from 1975 to present, then this means that ALL+ of the decline occurred when there was a decline in global temperatures.
But of course it’s all attributed to global warming.
cheers
Arnost
Arnost – let’s do a thought experiment. Assume AGW is real and happening.
BUT we also know from observation that the existing climate system is noisy (within bounds) – El Nino and La Nina events occur periodically, there are longer term Pacific, Atlantic and other oscillations, and chaos and noise. Droughts, floods, storms, hurricanes and extremes of temperature also occur and add to the noise.
So imagine you’re a scientist trying to detect a departure trend from the noise of variability.
You may have it nailed 100% in 30 years time but you’re here today as the effect starts to kick in.
Think it might be statistically and intellectually challenging in the early days of warming? This is where we are?
Of bloody course it’s unclear. What else would you expect?
Can’t have Luke being razzled by blog noise hey.
Arnost: some modern technologies live only by their ability to distinguish energy change in the noise floor. Reading rates of change was the key to finding new signals. Read up on pulse and spread spectrum maths for starters.
We can make a lot from small changes with the right will but its not from your average science.
Luke – let’s do a thought experiment – assume Global Warming real and is happening.
Somebody does a study that is seized on by powers with an agenda and over-endorsed. These powers have now put their reputations, influence and “power” on the line.
Should it be subsequently shown that they were wrong – they lose their reputations and power.
What is the outcome? These powers use whatever influence they have to suppress anything that is a challenge.
Case in point – Greg Nickels could not stand up and say that the drum he was beating “there’s been a 50% decline in snow levels” is really “there’s been no decline or maybe a little bit of an increase”. He would immediately loose all credibility, and at the next election – power.
Extrapolate this to the level of the UN.
It is not a conspiracy – I don’t believe in that sort of stuff – but it is a cover-up. And this happens time and time again.
What are the symptoms – censorship, restricted access to damaging information, villification of contrarians, and exageration supported by propaganda.
Sorry – got to get the kids to bed…
cheers
Arnost
“What are the symptoms – censorship, restricted access to damaging information, villification of contrarians, and exaggeration supported by propaganda.” – oh come now – vast amount of air-time and media space dedicated to a contrarian case mostly of lies and bull dust, our national newspaper against AGW, scores of anti-blogs, the USA and Australia not signed up, US scientists persecuted by pollies, 1000s of pages of climate science in the IPCC process which nobody even reads.
Whingy whinge I think.
Are you sure you’re not confusing the normal goings on and argy bargy in the political process of modern western democracies.
I can’t offer a properly argued position here, merely an eyewitness account. I did visit the cascades just a few years back, five in fact. I saw myself, glaciers that had retreated. This is not hearsay, I really saw it. I can’t quantify it in measured objective terms, but it was clearly and plainly obvious. At the time, what I saw was indisputable, to me anyway. I have a BA, and at the ripe old age of sixty doing a second qualification in Planning. I have no need to make up a story, or even to change the direction of the great minds contributing to this debate. Make what you will of my account….
Although I directed that comment to Arnost I read a lot of others like Roger and wondered who has any idea how we should build on good impressions based purely on experience in a particular discipline.
Trust is something I learnt early after surviving the first bit on the op table with a bunch of local GP’s
But it starts right here at the top with the choice of thread doesn’t it Jennifer? Big issues like climate change are only ever the under current.
We saw on Catalyst tonight how science has gone back to Peter Andrews with his “natural sequence farming” NSF with stream flow, soakage improvements etc to give the underground reservoir a recharge based entirely on Peter’s “holist” view of nature.
http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/s1925553.htm
As I often say – science is still catching up with our events
Of course climate change is happening, it is real, it is now and the effects will be catastrophic.
Only a few will survive the oncoming onslaught, or should I say a couple of each species, choose your partner and All Aboard The Ark –
—————————————-
“Greenpeace builds replica of Noah’s Ark
The Associated Press
05/16/2007
ISTANBUL, Turkey- Environmental activists are building a replica of Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat—where the biblical vessel is said to have landed after the great flood—in an appeal for action on global warming, Greenpeace said Wednesday.
Turkish and German volunteer carpenters are making the wooden ship on the mountain in eastern Turkey, bordering Iran. The ark will be revealed in a ceremony on May 31, a day after Greenpeace activists climb the mountain and call on world leaders to take action to tackle climate change, Greenpeace said.
“Climate change is real, it’s happening now and unless world leaders take urgent, decisive and far-reaching action, the next decades will see human misery on a scale not experienced in modern times,” said Greenpeace activist Hilal Atici. “Those leaders have a mandate from the people … to massively cut greenhouse gas emissions and to do it now……..”
http://www.montereyherald.com/ci_5908447
Arnost has picked up a very good point about the retreat in icepack taking place at a time when the global mean temperature had declined and levelled.
But we have to be careful with North and South American data because their response to an ElNino is the opposite of ours. Remember, they had major snow deposition in 1998 and that was the year El Nino delivered a spike in Global mean temperatures. But as with the rain in the Pacific NW, the temperature in the PNW was counter cyclical to the broader global temperature record.
The really interesting question is whether the set of records that make up the global mean temperature is biased towards recording the dry/hot part of the El Nino event while under representing the locations where it is wet/cool?
How far out into the north pacific does this PNW counter cyclical relationship extend?
We know, for example, that the BOM stations selected to contribute to the Australian mean annual temp series is biased towards the south and east and coastal sites. See map http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/reference.shtml
And while changes in temperature for the Australian landmass are most relevent to we who live here, in global terms, a set of the same number of stations in a similar sized part of the south pacific or southern ocean should have the same weighting as those on the mainland if we are serious about determining proper global mean temperature records.
The map tells us that NSW with 10% of the land mass has 23 stations, 9 coastal and 14 inland. Victoria and Tasmania have 7 stations each and only 1 in each is inland. SA has 11 stations, 7 of them coastal. WA, with three times the area of NSW, only has 22 stations evenly split between coastal and inland. NT has only 6 stations, 2 coastal and Qld has 19 stations, 10 of them coastal.
The 94 land mass stations have a mean footprint of 8.3 million hectares each but the footprint for Tasmania is only 1 million ha. The footprint for WA stations is 11.4 million ha while NSW is 3.5 million ha.
And the big question is, how would the Australian Mean annual temperature series change if these stations were properly weighted?
address the issue with a clear answer Motty as fundamental attribution errors overlay each other to skew your outlook.
Did Mr not Allbright put forward some pickled cherries or what?
Pinxi: “address the issue with a clear answer Motty” in response to “And the big question is, how would the Australian Mean annual temperature series change” etc. yes Ian is still scratching in the dust for grit on the subject like an old rooster.
Callers to ABC radio today with their rainfall numbers overnight are a good case. The ACT got about 30 mm hooray! It matters not what the airport says (BOM) hey.
Further west there was more and certain records will be broken for the day, the week and month whatever. Who really cares about that detail?
What matters in the Murray Darling Basin is the underground reservoir is still dry.
A farmer doggedly steadfast in his experience bless him, reckoned on ABC 666 that it was all part of the natural cycles. I bet however nobody in the region lets up on our water managers today.
IMHO All this backwards looking blog stuff including picking cherries is a handicap.
We had more on the “Carbon Corundum” another report by ABC’s Barbara Miller (AM today) with key findings from ocean research based in East Anglia and Tasmania. The ability of our major oceans to absorb even another decade of emissions is in serious doubt now.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/ghcn-monthly/images/ghcn_temp_overview.pdf
shows the GISS station network – if anything we have more long term data from the USA than anywhere else. And there has been lots of debates about averages lately on the net.
But are not the estimates of Australian mean temperatures area weighted? I’m asking?
Regardless if look at the various regional analyses for temperature on BoM’s site they all follow the same basic pattern.
And Gavin – well cognitive dissonance tends to make you pray that’s all natural. A cynic might add though that you may need 1,000 years to know what natural is !
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/05/17/climate.ocean.reut/index.html
Scientists wrong again. The oceans ability to absorb CO2 has been overestimated.
Like I said, so many people assume they are overestimating what is going to happen, what if they are underestimating?
Luke: Although meta data analysis is not my field I know someone well enough who’s job it is to sort.
BTW Peter was on talkback asking about ACTEW data on bushfire affected forest recovery and inflow rates. I doubt their head knows.
Airport update: 19mm (official) but somebody else called in to our ABC from the city with 35 mm of rain beaudy! Another with 32 hey, what’s the effective mean?
My mate has some metal secure in her elbow, like our ants it too complains when it threatens rain. Each to their own on the issue of climate change
If you look through the GISS paper in Luke’s post above, doing duplication, homogeniety and other quality control adjustments sounds great and logical.
However, what does it mean in practice?
Have a look at this site – go to the map towards the end and click on any part of Australia to see which stations were included, and which are no longer used in that region. (The date will tell you when the last data from that station was included in the global averages.)
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/
It means that GISS no longer includes Sydney Observatory Hill Temps (and a swag of other sites in the metro region) but only Sydney Airport as a proxy for the Sydney region and beyond. (Sydney airport with its expanse of runways, taxiways etc can be argued to be a bigger UHI than OBS Hill is on average warmer – esp at night).
And in fact brousing through the active GISS stations shows that probably half are airports and are classified “rural”.
This is why there is a debate about averages, and perceived bias.
cheers
Arnost
Arnost – what you need to do is show that a couple of possible dodgy stations intoduces massive systematic bias. It doesn’t IMO. How much would this bias the results? Look at BoM’s temperature trend time series anyway – major cities aren’t included – you get the same answer.
And the global surface temperature curve shows up in other proxies.
CHOCKAS (adding to SJT’s insightful contribution) !
The Southern Ocean around Antarctica is so loaded with carbon dioxide that it can barely absorb any more, so more of the gas will stay in the atmosphere to warm up the planet, scientists reported Thursday.
Human activity is the main culprit, said researcher Corinne Le Quere, who called the finding very alarming.
The phenomenon wasn’t expected to be apparent for decades, Le Quere said in a telephone interview from the University of East Anglia in Britain.
“We thought we would be able to detect these only the second half of this century, say 2050 or so,” she said. But data from 1981 through 2004 show the sink is already full of carbon dioxide. “So I find this really quite alarming.”
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/05/17/climate.ocean.reut/index.html
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1136188v1
lgmacweb.env.uea.ac.uk/e415/publi/Le_Quere_et_al_Science_reprint_2007.pdf
SLUSH !
Vast areas of snow in Antarctica melted in 2005 when temperatures warmed up for a week in the summer in a process that may accelerate invisible melting deep beneath the surface, NASA said on Tuesday.
A new analysis of satellite data showed that an area the size of California melted and then re-froze — the most significant thawing in 30 years, the U.S. space agency said.
Unlike the Arctic, Antarctica has shown little to no warming in the recent past with the exception of the Antarctic Peninsula, where ice sheets have been breaking apart.
Son Nghiem of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and Konrad Steffen of the University of Colorado in Boulder measured snowfall accumulation and melt in Antarctica from July 1999 through July 2005.
They found evidence of melting in several areas, including high elevations and far inland in January of 2005, when temperatures got as high as 41 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius).
“Increases in snowmelt, such as this in 2005, definitely could have an impact on larger scale melting of Antarctica’s ice sheets if they were severe or sustained over time,” Steffen said in a statement.
“Water from melted snow can penetrate into ice sheets through cracks and narrow, tubular glacial shafts called moulins,” Steffen added.
“If sufficient melt water is available, it may reach the bottom of the ice sheet. This water can lubricate the underside of the ice sheet at the bedrock, causing the ice mass to move toward the ocean faster, increasing sea level.”
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/05/16/antarctica.melting.reut/index.html
That Antarctic ice melt story is the same load of bollocks the climate cretins have been flogging in Greenland.
They detected a large area in which minor surface melting took place for a week in mid summer. And then it froze again.
The crap about water going down cracks is purely speculative and appears to be based on two very dodgy assumptions;
1 that the conditions could persist for long enough in a location so far below the Antarctic circle that sunlight incidence is severely restricted by latitude, and
2 that this thin layer of melt water, at just above 0.0C would not refreeze the moment it dropped down a crack where it was surrounded by ice that is still well below 0.0C.
And we’ll get to the saturated southern ocean fantasy in due course.
Luke
BoM does a great job – and I trust it without reservation.
But this great job is ignored by GISS in their global temperature evaluations… Why?
If Sydney Airport is the only station used by GISS for an area of some 200-300 sq km, then how do they account for say Katoomba in the Blue Mountains? I suspect it’s all modeled – we’re back to computers and we are dealing with GIGO.
I haven’t done deep digging into GISS – but I have comperd BoM data to NOAA/NCDC (which now uses similar adjustments).
Compare this
http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/silo/reg/brs/temp_maps_awa.cgi?variable=meananom&area=nat&period=month&time=history&steps=4
and compare with this (expand the Australian section of the map if you like):
http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2006/dec/global.html#Temp
The NOAA average is way off! Australia is just about all red, and by the looks by as much as 2 degrees +ve anomaly where a -ve anomaly of 2 degrees is shown by BoM (Central Qld esp).
We are talking a global anomaly of about +0.5C – and for Australia there’s a DISCREPANCY of +2-3C. If these sort of errors are allowed – GIGO.
cheers
Arnost
Arnost
as Gavin has already pointed out, you can deduce a signal even in a significant amount of noise. This technology is in use today, and it is proven, it works.
Arnost: what is far more interesting than your concern with BRS versus NOAA is the plus 2-2.5 Dec anomalies in the Pacific ie the Southern Ocean and all along the Equator.
IMO that’s the best explanation we’ve got for the SE Aus. conditions then. Now don’t you worry too much about BRS hey
Arnost: the northern hemisphere is probably stuffed but if everybody pulls their finger out it seems we still have a chance of enjoying reasonable conditions down under for a while at least.
What got me thinking long before blogging, a dear old lady visiting us from Europe a while back said then she was dismayed by what she saw round her old home areas in the Swiss Alps.
Gavin,
The Dec 2-2.5 Dec anomalies in the Pacific = the El Nino that running then. If the La Nina eventuates – you will have the same but negative anomalies.
cheers
Arnost
Arnost
the El Nino seems to be getting stronger, the La Nina not so.
Interesting site, Arnost. When one goes to the map and clicks on sanfrancisco and then check all the proximate stations with records through to 2006/7 we get a number of records all showing a steady upward temperature trend. But when we go to Hawaii we get a clear upward trend from honolulu and it’s 850,000 population heat island but a very long traverse to a few stations that show no rise since 1975.
The same applies to Tahiti, where it and Takaroa have a steady rise of 1C from 1960 to 2007 but the next two nearest records, Rapa and Atuona, 1245km and 1432km away in opposite directions, record only +0.2C from 1950 to 2007 and 0.0C change from 1975 to 2007 respectively.
The next two nearest, Gambier Is (1654km) and Hihifo (2886km away) record -0.6C drop from 1960 to 2007 and -0.4C drop from 1950 to 1990 respectively.
So we have some very significant variation between 6 records, over an area which, if it were the USA or Europe, would have 50 to 100 records, all showing a steady warming trend.
Clearly, the global mean surface temp data is biased towards human habitation. It would obviously be biased towards low level inhabited space rather than mountain tops etc, and clearly biased towards coastal locations rather than inland ones.
But climate is not driven by human settlement patterns. So there is substantial room for doubting that the recorded global mean temperature is an accurate one.
Ian – none of these OBSERVED cracks, groundwater movement are definitive. But the scientists observing them think they’re new behaviour. So you can laugh and pour crap on them. You can dismiss it as decadal or unknown background (i.e the more we look the more we find out) – or you can say … mmmm… interesting – better observe closely and put some effort into more appropriate measurement and tracking. Duty of care says we need to know. The undermining through cracks and massive groundwater systems has observational backup which I have posted before and are here in the archives. It’s not “made up”.
And I haven’t declared it as “the end of the world” – simply a trickling of evidence that maybe finally global warming effects in Antartica are finally underway.
So again I say – you don’t have to necessarily boot the science if it’s straight off the bat. You can rail all you like about political, NGO, greenie, or policy responses or interpretations/extrapolations of the science which you may feel as inappropriate.
Not that you’d listen to me anyway !
And again separating climate change from background variation and decadal variation is THE challenge for those involved in attribution. And is AGW is totally true we will still have both going on at once.
And as for the CO2 saturation – I’m frankly surprised myself – but there are some serious dudes as authors and it is published. The science is complex shite so needs some disgestion. So perhaps we ought at least give them the courtesy of a good read. Full pdf’s available and cited above.
SJT,
I don’t think so. Although neutral, current conditions continue to display the precursors required for the development of a La Niña event.
These include cooler than normal conditions in the Pacific Ocean subsurface – a situation that has persisted since mid-January – which has led to cooler than average surface waters in the far eastern Pacific. Over the past two weeks, these surface waters have undergone further slow and steady cooling, though they remain largely confined to the eastern edge of the basin.
These conditions, combined with the fact that all major international coupled models show further cooling of the equatorial Pacific Ocean over the coming months, suggest that there is an elevated chance of a La Niña event occurring during 2007. Conversely, they suggest that the El Niño risk is very low.
Current SST anomaly:
http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/EPS/SST/data/anomnight.5.17.2007.gif
cheers
Arnost
Sorry,
Didn’t link the sub-surface temp anomalies.
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/sub_surf_apr.gif
cheers
Arnost
Very interesting site, Arnost, including Troposphere temperature trend.
http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/2006/dec/ratpac-ytd-dec-pg.gif
*up*
I did not imply that anyone was suggesting it was the end of the world, Luke. But the authors have taken one long shot probability and extrapolated from it even further.
It is now the standard climate “science” modus operandi. Do a vast amount of solid science and then spend the last few paragraphs turning out some sort of juicy purple science speculation to ensure that they get a headline for the next funding round.
It is the same crap as the PETM study. No doubting the quality of the science that established the time frame of the warming and the volcanic activity but they just can’t help themselves when it comes to bullshit speculation on long shot causal agents that ignore much more probable explanations.
This under ice groundwater seepage scarenario ignores the most fundamental of heat balance relationships. On one hand we have a humungous volume of sub-zero temperature ice and we are seriously expected to believe that shallow puddles of surface melt water at just above 0.0C will not only remain as water when trickling down into the ice mass, but also remain sufficiently warm to undermine the integrity of the 2km of solid ice above it.
And as for southern ocean CO2 saturation, I made it clear that I would look into it closely in due course.
Ian: do you really drive your car with one foot dragging on the road for security?
I think its time we asked Ian about ST under the ice cap, also liquid under pressure.
Ian
“It is now the standard climate “science” modus operandi. Do a vast amount of solid science and then spend the last few paragraphs turning out some sort of juicy purple science speculation to ensure that they get a headline for the next funding round.”
Do you have any evidence to support that claim?
WIKI on Lake Vostok
“The average water temperature is around −3 °C; it remains liquid below the normal freezing point because of high pressure from the weight of the ice above it. Geothermal heat from the Earth’s interior warms the bottom of the lake. The ice sheet itself insulates the lake from cold temperatures on the surface”
I can’t resist another question: What about the rivers? down under that ics cap!
So what, Gavin? When you have evidence of significant flows of water in and out of Lake Vostok, and some evidence of major instability in the ice sheet that results from this water, then, please, do come and tell us all about it. In the mean time, spare us the bullshit up the flag pole.
Note: “IF sufficient melt water is available, it MAY [my emphasis] reach the bottom of the ice sheet. This water can lubricate the underside of the ice sheet at the bedrock, causing the ice mass to move toward the ocean faster, increasing sea level.”
That is, if the Earth forms a new orbit and exposes sufficient surface ice to extended sunlight, it may produce suffient volume of water to reach the bottom of the ice sheet. Unless of course, the water re-freezes on the way down, blocks the crack and backfills the leak. Then some of it MAY reach the bottom and “lubricate” the underside of the ice sheet to such an extent that the very slow ice movement speeds up to, maybe, 2 metres each century.
Then again, it might just sit there, just as Lake Vostok has done, for how many millenia now.
And spare us the fatuous request for evidence on climate science MO, SJT. As if Spivanthropus climatensis is going to produce “ponce reviewed” research on their own shonkademia. Give us a break.
Satellite Helps Detect Massive Rivers Under Antarctica
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/04/060422120954.htm
Buried Lakes Send Antarctica’s Ice Slipping Faster Into the Sea
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/070221-antarctica-lakes.html
Nature 445, 904-907 (22 February 2007) | doi:10.1038/nature05554; Received 26 June 2006; Accepted 27 December 2006
Large subglacial lakes in East Antarctica at the onset of fast-flowing ice streams
Robin E. Bell1, Michael Studinger1, Christopher A. Shuman2, Mark A. Fahnestock3 and Ian Joughin4
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, Palisades, New York 10964-8000, USA
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771, USA
Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space, University of New Hampshire, Durham, New Hampshire 03824, USA
Applied Physics Lab, University of Washington, 1013 NE 40th Street, Seattle, Washington 98105-6698, USA
Correspondence to: Robin E. Bell1 Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to R.E.B. (Email: robinb@ldeo.columbia.edu).
Top of pageWater plays a crucial role in ice-sheet stability and the onset of ice streams. Subglacial lake water moves between lakes1 and rapidly drains, causing catastrophic floods2. The exact mechanisms by which subglacial lakes influence ice-sheet dynamics are unknown, however, and large subglacial lakes3, 4 have not been closely associated with rapidly flowing ice streams. Here we use satellite imagery and ice-surface elevations to identify a region of subglacial lakes, similar in total area to Lake Vostok, at the onset region of the Recovery Glacier ice stream in East Antarctica and predicted by ice-sheet models5. We define four lakes through extensive, flat, featureless regions of ice surface bounded by upstream troughs and downstream ridges. Using ice velocities determined using interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR), we find the onset of rapid flow (moving at 20 to 30 m yr-1) of the tributaries to the Recovery Glacier ice stream in a 280-km-wide segment at the downslope margins of these four subglacial lakes. We conclude that the subglacial lakes initiate and maintain rapid ice flow through either active modification of the basal thermal regime of the ice sheet by lake accretion or through scouring bedrock channels in periodic drainage events. We suggest that the role of subglacial lakes needs to be considered in ice-sheet mass balance assessments.
Vol. 315. no. 5818, pp. 1544 – 1548
DOI: 10.1126/science.1136897
An Active Subglacial Water System in West Antarctica Mapped from Space
Helen Amanda Fricker,1* Ted Scambos,2 Robert Bindschadler,3 Laurie Padman4
Satellite laser altimeter elevation profiles from 2003 to 2006 collected over the lower parts of Whillans and Mercer ice streams, West Antarctica, reveal 14 regions of temporally varying elevation, which we interpret as the surface expression of subglacial water movement. Vertical motion and spatial extent of two of the largest regions are confirmed by satellite image differencing. A major, previously unknown subglacial lake near the grounding line of Whillans Ice Stream is observed to drain 2.0 cubic kilometers of water into the ocean over 3 years, while elsewhere a similar volume of water is being stored subglacially. These observations reveal a wide spread, dynamic subglacial water system that may exert an important control on ice flow and mass balance.
1 Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA.
2 National Snow and Ice Data Center, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80302, USA.
3 NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA.
4 Earth & Space Research, Corvallis, OR 97333, USA.
Science 24 March 2006:
Vol. 311. no. 5768, pp. 1754 – 1756
DOI: 10.1126/science.1123785
Measurements of Time-Variable Gravity Show Mass Loss in Antarctica
Isabella Velicogna1,2* and John Wahr1*
Using measurements of time-variable gravity from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites, we determined mass variations of the Antarctic ice sheet during 2002–2005. We found that the mass of the ice sheet decreased significantly, at a rate of 152 ± 80 cubic kilometers of ice per year, which is equivalent to 0.4 ± 0.2 millimeters of global sea-level rise per year. Most of this mass loss came from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
1 University of Colorado, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and Department of Physics, University Campus Box 390, Boulder, CO 80309–0390, USA.
2 Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Mail Stop 300-233, Pasadena, CA 91109–8099, USA.
Ian
“And spare us the fatuous request for evidence on climate science MO, SJT. As if Spivanthropus climatensis is going to produce “ponce reviewed” research on their own shonkademia. Give us a break.”
So do you have any evidence that your claim is correct and proven? Is it just a product of your imagination?
Ian: Its water that slips the ice, not bullshit.
Other readers may recall I once worked with long term Antarctica expeditionary officers. Any good science we have today comes from their efforts. I specifically recall comments about their work on crevasses and say from the evidence like Luke posted above there are now obvious changes.
Have some respect
Guys,
Antarctic sub-glacial lakes exist for two reasons: Because at the base of the ice the extreme pressure of all of that ice reduces the melting point of ice, and the geothermal heat through the crust raises the temperature such that melt water can exist.
Even a normal amount of geothermal heat is sufficient for this to occur, but it appears that Lake Vostok is situated in a rift valley setting, so it is possible that there is a higher than average flow of heat in this area.
What is also interesting is that at some past time Lake Vostok was far deeper – because where the core sample was drilled there is some 200 meters of re-frozen ice.
A good reference worthwhile reading (pre GW science budgets) is here:
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/pi/vostok/Report.pdf
Nothing in this world is certain – however to attribute melting of ice UNDER two or three kloms of ice to ATMOSPHERIC global warming has to taken with a grain of salt.
cheers
Arnost
At least 145 subglacial lakes have been mapped beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet (1). Recent pivotal studies based on satellite data have demonstrated that Antarctic subglacial water can move in large volumes between lakes, on short time scales and over long distances (2, 3). Large outbursts of subglacial water have been observed in coastal regions (4), but it is not known how frequently these occur, nor the total amount of water involved continent-wide. Water beneath an ice stream, acting as a lubricant either between the ice and subglacial bed or between grains of a subglacial till, affects ice flow rates (5).
Water in the largest subglacial lakes may also play a part in regional
and global climate in a more catastrophic manner. Sudden lake water
releases or outburst floods are known to originate in the interior of
East Antarctica and to reach the coast. The Recovery subglacial lakes
collect basal water from a larger area (387,890 km2) than any other
subglacial lake system yet studied, and subsequently may fill faster
and be more dynamic than lakes closer to the ice divides. Assuming a
basal melt rate of 1mmyr21 over the catchment, the Recovery subglacial
lakes have sufficient water input to have filled since the Last Glacial Maximum,
unlike Vostok and other large interior lakes.
Rapidly filling lakes may periodically drain, flush down the ice
streams and scour bedrock channels, enhancing rapid ice flow the
same way that basal water produces rapid ice motion during a glacier
surge21. An outburst similar in scale to the lake-to-lake drainage in
East Antarctica1 (1.8 km3) would have a periodicity of ,4.5 years,
whereas an event of scale of the order of the East Antarctic outburst
floods2 would have a periodicity of thousands of years. Episodic
draining of large subglacial lakes provides another mechanism for
the initiation of climatically significant rapid ice flow with ice streams
developing along the scoured channels.
The Recovery subglacial lakes capture water from a large area,
effectively concentrating the energy from basal melting and rereleasing
it where it can have a significant impact on ice flow through
either basal accretion or catastrophic drainage. Contributing 35 gigatons
per year of ice to the global oceans11, the Recovery subglacial
lakes and the associated Recovery ice stream tributaries have the
potential greatly to affect the drainage of the East Antarctic ice sheet
and its influence on sea level rise in the near future. Subglacial lakes
and the associated hydrologic systems are crucial components in the
dynamic evolution of ice sheets and need to be incorporated into icesheet
models that are used for climate predictions.
And all a consequence of geothermal heating
cheers
Arnost
Aaaah! For Ian’s sake, show us your evidence Arnost
Arnost – didn’t say it was anything else. But we do have water flowing around down there and out to sea. And if AGW removes a useful plug you might get a gusher, ice collapse, or maybe nothing much at all. And despite protestations of impossibility, water does seem to exist and flow around.
Interesting to ponder that the winds affecting the southern ocean CO2 sink might be also related to the Australian drought. Cool eh?
Rapid rise in global warming is forecast
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article1805870.ece
Luke – OK, I’ll accept that this may be an issue. However – these under ice rivers either already empty into the sea, or the under ice lakes lie in depressions.
An argument may be made that even if the “ice blockage” was removed that the effect would be insignificant in the case of ice rivers – i.e. they already flow into the sea, or insignificant in the case of ice lakes – i.e. because the water is in a depression and therefore would not naturally “flow” into the sea.
Hydraulics suggest that fluid will move from an area with a higher surface pressure to a lower one – so it will depend on whether the ice water is under pressure from the ice above – if not, an argument may be made that the water could actually flow from the sea to fill any gaps under the ice.
But I know sweet FA about this really so it’s all just an intelectual exercise.
cheers
Arnost
“Hydraulics suggest that fluid will move from an area with a higher surface pressure to a lower one”
Arnost oh mate that’s the key!
Question is what lowered the pressure anywhere under that ice block
The usual barage of factoids but not the slightest capacity to put it in perspective. “The Recovery subglacial lakes collect basal water from a larger area (387,890 km2)” now lets see, multiply that by 3km thickness and we get 1.16 million Km3 of ice in that basin.
And then we add, “we find the onset of rapid flow (moving at 20 to 30 m yr-1) of the tributaries to the Recovery Glacier ice stream in a 280-km-wide segment at the downslope margins” And this gives us 280km wide x 3km thick = 840km3 x 0.03km/year = 25km3 of annual ice movement.
And divide 1.16 million km3 of ice in the basin by 25km3/year and, assuming no new ice formation, we still have 46,400 years before we run out of ice in that basin. I can live with that sort of “rapid flow”.
This “slip sideways” scarenario might sound plausible to your average departmental boofhead but do you folks have any idea what sort of energy inputs are required to overcome the inertia of 1.16 million Gigatonnes of ice? That is still connected to another 30 to 40 million Gigatonnes?
Note the total estimate of water flow from under the ice is 152km3 +-80km3. And with this we get the usual conversion of this into sea level rise of between 0.4mm and 0.2mm each year.
But wait, what about new ice deposition. The total area of ice is in the order of 14.2 million square km so it would only take (152/14200000) 10.7mm of precipitation, which must obviously come from evaporating oceans, to produce zero change in sea level.
But in fact, the actual is much more. According to http://www.coolantarctica.com/Antarctica%20fact%20file/antarctica%20environment/whats%20it%20like%20in%20Antarctica.htm
“In the interior of the continent the average annual precipitation (in *equivalent of water) is only about 50 mm (about 2 in), less than the Sahara. Along the coast, this increases, but is still only about 200 mm (8 in) in *equivalent of water. Heavy snowfalls occur when cyclonic storms pick up moisture from the surrounding seas and then deposit this moisture as snow along the coasts”.
So once again we have so-called balanced, peer reviewed climate science that feels duty bound to tell us that some phenomenon is causing 0.2 to 0.4mm of sea level rise while neglecting to point out that new ice formation is causing at least five times that amount of sea level decline. That is, 760km3 or a minimum 2.0mm drop each #@%&* year!
While some of us are desperate to prove absolutely nothing is going on others are looking for early warning signs.
(1) the area that thawed and melted only to refreeze again was seen to be new
(2) it appears that we do have water underneath the ice – and that it does pop up, discharge and move around
(3) the papers say that sometimes massive floods do occur
(4) the issue of mass balance of Antartica is missing the point. The real observation is why is the WAIS losing mass. Is it a long term trend. DO we believe the errors in GRACE are acceptable.
(5) The BIGGIE is the polar vortex jammed on one way !!!
(6) Is the vortex behind the Australian drought sequence on 5-7 years
(7) why is the mid-troposhere above Antarctica warming at a rate higher than anywhere else on Earth.
(8) Greenland’s glaciers seem to be speeding up their hydrological response.
(9) There’s good paleo evidence to suggest ice sheets have melted before.
None of this nails anything totally – but to me adds to a suspicion that things are indeed changing, and changing quickly.
Other research has warned of ice sheet instability:
Seasonality and Increasing Frequency
of Greenland Glacial Earthquakes
Go¨ ran Ekstro¨m,1* Meredith Nettles,2 Victor C. Tsai1
Some glaciers and ice streams periodically lurch forward with sufficient force to generate emissions
of elastic waves that are recorded on seismometers worldwide. Such glacial earthquakes on
Greenland show a strong seasonality as well as a doubling of their rate of occurrence over the past
5 years. These temporal patterns suggest a link to the hydrological cycle and are indicative of a
dynamic glacial response to changing climate conditions.
Paleoclimatic Evidence for Future
Ice-Sheet Instability and
Rapid Sea-Level Rise
Jonathan T. Overpeck,1* Bette L. Otto-Bliesner,2 Gifford H. Miller,3 Daniel R. Muhs,4
Richard B. Alley,5 Jeffrey T. Kiehl2
Sea-level rise from melting of polar ice sheets is one of the largest potential threats of future
climate change. Polar warming by the year 2100 may reach levels similar to those of 130,000 to
127,000 years ago that were associated with sea levels several meters above modern levels; both
the Greenland Ice Sheet and portions of the Antarctic Ice Sheet may be vulnerable. The record of
past ice-sheet melting indicates that the rate of future melting and related sea-level rise could be
faster than widely thought.
An interesting post by RC on Zero Carbon re the IPCC sea level numbers – March 2007
“Finally, there is another way how ice sheets can contribute to sea level rise: rather than melting at the surface, they can start to flow more rapidly. This is in fact increasingly observed around the edges of Greenland and Antarctica in recent years: outlet glaciers and ice streams that drain the ice sheets have greatly accelerated their flow. Numerous processes contribute to this, including the removal of buttressing ice shelves (i.e., ice tongues floating on water but in places anchored on islands or underwater rocks) or the lubrication of the ice sheet base by meltwater trickling down from the surface through cracks. These processes cannot yet be properly modelled, but observations suggest that they have contributed 0 – 0.7 mm/year to sea level rise during the period 1993-2003. The projections in the table given above assume that this contribution simply remains constant until the end of this century”
http://www.zerocarbonnow.org/?m=200703
It links to “Model Failure is the Key Issue” on RC – 2006
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/06/ice-sheets-and-sea-level-rise-model-failure-is-the-key-issue/
Ian: 2100 remains at best a guess given whole blocks can slip off unexpectedly. What is certain; nobody is going see them put back in their lifetime.
Luke: what Ian seems to be saying there is no case for changing sea levels, not ever!
However I’m quite prepared for Ian or any one else for that mater to explain the old coast lines clearly visible about 2m above present Bass Strait levels then say when the southern most tribes last crossed. What was their time frame?
You guys just don’t get it, do you. If precipitation on top of the ice sheet is minimum 50mm/year, and evaporation is effectively zero, then global sea levels would be dropping by 2.0mm each year. The fact that this does not appear to have been the case for the past 10 millenia would seem to confirm that these subglacial lakes have been releasing water for a very long time.
It is interesting to note that while the extent of the newly discovered surface ice melt has been widely reported and speculated on, no-one appears to have bothered to tell us how deep this puddle was. Indeed, how deep could it actually get if the melt period was only a week before it froze up again? Are we talking 1.0mm or, gosh, 2.0mm?
This whole scarenario is riddled with material omissions and rabid speculation. But lets look at the quote from our old mate Scamboss, above;
“A major, previously unknown subglacial lake near the grounding line of Whillans Ice Stream is observed to drain 2.0 cubic kilometers of water into the ocean over 3 years”.
So what? 2.0km3 over 3 years is only 666,000 megalitres a year. That is only slightly more than the Northern half of the Brisbane River in a normal year. And no-one is speculating about it’s impact on global sea level. Is it such a surprise to find a drainage system that size on as continent the size of Antarctica?
And on Luke’s last post about sea level 130,000 years ago, the author should have pointed out that global mean temperatures were also 4.0C warmer than at present.
Gavin makes up his own gonzo set of assumptions, attributes them to me, and then wins his own argument. Stop it fella, you’ll go blind.
A recent book “A Voyage of Discovery” by Professor Lance Endersbee AO, makes the rather startling proposition that most of the drinking water humanity extracts from the earth is not from recycled rainwater but from water produced from the earth’s mantle. And he shows that petroleum is also produced from the mantle supplying scientific data that I was unaware of.
If this is so, then many of the assumptions made in climate science are plain wrong. But then, that is science, when new facts emerge we change our minds.
One can purchase the book from Monash University Bookshop, and I tend to agree with Endersbee’s assessment.
One of the more interesting graphs of mean temperature reproduced are those for 27 rural recording Australian Stations in Australia from 1890 to 1990 which show no warming at all while the city temperatures do. He correctly concludes the temperature rise is an urban phenomenon.
Endersbee was former Dean of Engineering and former Pro-Vice Chancellor of Monash University.
The most interesting aspect of his book is the effect that Anglo-Saxon science has on science in general – It is the English who fundamentally changed geology from its empirical basis in 1832 by Charles Lyell’s influence (along with the other Whig scientists of the day) and now we have the British Hadley Centre bastardising climate science for political purposes.
This book is a must read, if only for Endersbee’s assertion that “the deep ground water, on which 3 billion people depend for most of their drinking water and food, is running out at an unprecedented rate.”
Higher res image of 2005 Antarctic melt
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/176700main_arctic20070515-hi-res.jpg
Well Lance better hand in his AO – yet another ageing geologist past their use-by date and out of their depth. BoM’s reference network of carefully selected stations which doesn’t include capital cities shows broad warming particularly in the inland.
I mean really – do we have to put up with this sort of sheer nonsense and drivel.
Luke, before I go on a wild goose chase, can you tell me where you sourced the
“BoM’s reference network of carefully selected stations which doesn’t include capital cities shows broad warming particularly in the inland”
Is it for the same 100 yr base i.e. 1890 – 1990? Just to make sure that we are still off topic – or are we very much on topic and getting into a perfect example of an Albright / Mote dispute? 🙂
I don’t have quick access to the pre 1910 Federation Drought data (can get some of it if need be), but a quick visual inspection of below
http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/silo/reg/cli_chg/timeseries.cgi
and “notionally” incorporating the higher than normal fed drought temps would suggest a relatively flat or at best a minor increasing trend over the 100 year base period to 1990. If this actually is so, then Endersbee’s conlusion that any increased temps are a driven by UHI may not be far of the mark.
cheers
Arnost
Here is where I’f start
Station ID Name Records from:
18070 PORT LINCOLN Jan 1892
26026 ROBE COMPARISON Sep 1884
29004 BURKETOWN POST OFFICE Nov 1890
30018 GEORGETOWN POST OFFICE Jan 1894
30045 RICHMOND POST OFFICE Jan 1893
34002 CHARTERS TOWERS POST OFFICE Feb 1893
38003 BOULIA AIRPORT Jan 1888
39039 GAYNDAH POST OFFICE Sep 1893
41023 DALBY POST OFFICE Jan 1893
48013 BOURKE POST OFFICE May 1877
52026 WALGETT COUNCIL DEPOT Feb 1879
56017 INVERELL COMPARISON Feb 1874
65016 FORBES (CAMP STREET) Feb 1879
74128 DENILIQUIN (WILKINSON ST) Feb 1858
90015 CAPE OTWAY LIGHTHOUSE Jan 1861
Arnost – Lordy lordy me.
BoM have gone to vast trouble to set up a reference network. If you talk to NCC you can get all their nitpicking tedious quality control stuff.
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/reference.shtml
All their climate stuff is under climate section.
As for the rainfall time series graph – not worth two knobs of goat poop when you’ve got massive anomalies across the nation e.g. the NW wetter and the SE drier.
Incidentally I reckon the whole UHI thing is a beatup. Turns out a lot of city weather stations are in parks which are cooler oases in the concrete jungle. OK not all.
And Parker’s famous paper about temperature trends at night http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=43
AND with all this “this weather station is no good” business you have to show that a few duds massively bias the overall result. It’s a sampling problem.
I think it’s interesting that while Antartica seemed to be bucking the trend elsewhere – contrary to predictions that the Poles would show the most pronounced effects of warming first – it was irrelevant , other factors at work , West Antartic Penninsula cooling etc etc.
Now that Antartica appears to be showing some signs of warming , it’s suddenly further vindication of the AGW hypothesis.
That’s a ” heads I win , tails you lose ” approach if I ever saw one.
Also
VOL. 16, NO. 18 Journal of Climate 15 September 2003
Assessment of Urban Versus Rural In Situ Surface Temperatures in the Contiguous United States: No Difference Found
http://blue.atmos.colostate.edu/publications/pdf/peterson2003.pdf
Jim – totally unfair – what has been said all along is that despite the Antarctic Peninsula warming quickly, the main Antarctic mass has not changed in temerpature substantially. An explanation being the polar vortex. And it has been added – until such time as the warming signal starts to overwhelm local influences – I see no inconsistency at all. More a selectivity as to what you have read. We “may” be seeing that warming starting now. Or maybe not.
Luke
You have not answered where you sourced the BoM’s reference… Is it or is it not the based on the same baseline.
You see the sites in the RCS network DON’T go back to 1890. So there’s no comparison – You are the one who’s putting up “sheer nonsence and drivel”.
LOL – You’ve put the thread right back on topic.
cheers
Arnost
Arnost Arnost Arnost – my text source was from here. http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/reference.shtml
You can see the stations for yourself. I don’t know the record lengths yet – am looking. However there are lots of traps with young players if you don’t carefully look at pre 1910 metadata – you can be seeing “artificial” increases in temperature from different measuring techniques. Go back too far into the 19th century and the measurement techniques are different. All well known by BoM and come in spinner stuff for people who don’t know. The devil is in the details.
BoM say
“Australia’s annual mean temperature anomaly is calculated using maximum and minimum temperature data from approximately 130 non-urban observing stations throughout the country. These stations are part of a high-quality temperature dataset developed to monitor long-term temperature trends in Australia. The temperature records at these stations have been corrected for discontinuities caused by changes such as instrumentation and site location. Climate Data Quality is particularly important at these stations.
Each calendar year the mean maximum and minimum temperature anomalies are calculated for every available high-quality temperature station, relative to the 1961 to 1990 reference period. ”
AND importantly
Note that Australian mean temperatures
prior to 1910 are insufficiently reliable for comparison due to lack of data
and changes in recording instruments
Perhaps you’d like another proxy like bore holes?
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~jsmerdon/papers/JQS_2006_Pollacketal.pdf
Luke
I’ve been all over the BoM site over the last year or so – I did say earlier that I trust the BoM without reservation.
What is the issue is that you rather rudely dismissied Endersbee’s conlusion with a totally uncalled for ad hom – and he’s likely right.
Even “official” records go back that far – each of the sites I posted previously is an official BoM site – you can look them up on BoM by the station ID I posted.
cheers
Arnost
Perhaps Arnost missed my early comments on using older instruments and records.
Through the late 50’s and early 60’s it was my job to calibrate a range of stuff sourced from afar as well as build a few of my own. Temperature like most other measurements in even the best places was plus and minus one percent. Humidity and flow were worse.
I routinely calibrated non linear devices on a daily basis in all sorts of places. Recorders were another specialty. At the practical level we all got by but scientist had a lot of problems dealing with the fudge. Each to his own until NATA stepped in. Understanding NATA principles is not discussed on this blog because nobody else has a clue where we’ve come from.
Arnost; until you have done some homework on techniques and practice through the decades don’t bother with mega data.
Ian on the other hand thinks he knows it all from a remote position. Ian should do some homework on measurements around the maritime stations. Many of BOM’s selection are related to old coastal weather needs and are particularly well positioned as high flow situations. Almost any one of them could be used as a guide to world temp change over the last 100 years or so.
I notice Ian insists on eliminating noisy locations in data whereas experience has me thinking about the noisy instruments all the time. Oddly enough though most of my problems in general industry measurements were the noisy people who did not understand what a graph displayed at any time.
Arnost – “He correctly concludes the temperature rise is an urban phenomenon.” – utter crap !!
BTW
http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/story.html?id=e4c99314-a71a-4418-a246-eea457e8b873&k=82636
Ice shelf collapse sends chill
An ancient ice shelf has cracked off northern Ellesmere Island, creating an enormous 66-square-kilometre ice island and leaving a trail of icy blocks in its wake.
The breakup was so powerful, earthquake monitors 250 kilometres away picked up the tremors as the 3,000- to 4,500-year-old shelf tore away from its fjord on Ellesmere.
The Ayles ice shelf was one of six ice shelves left in Canada, remnants of a vast icy fringe that used to cover the top end of Ellesmere.
Scientists consider the Canadian shelves, located about 800 kilometres south of the North Pole, sentinels that reflect the accelerating change in the Arctic.
In 2002, one of Vincent’s graduate students, Derek Mueller, discovered that Ellesmere’s Ward Hunt ice shelf had cracked in half. The researchers have also seen the sudden collapse of ice dams and the draining of 30-kilometre-long lakes into the sea.
The shelves are 90 per cent smaller than they were when Arctic explorer Robert Peary crossed them in 1906. And the Ayles ice shelf can be erased from Canada’s maps.
“It no longer exists,” Vincent said.
Luke,
Lance Endersbee is an engineer, not geologist.
You\, however, are a charlatan.
Luke,
“Ice shelf collapse sends chill”
Your explanation is utter crap. The reason ice shelves crack off is because of the enormous pressre behind from the ice making machine.
You are one ignorant twit,
Warning on Warming by Bill Mc Kibben
“Researchers know that sea levels will rise fairly quickly this century, in part because of the melting of mountain glaciers and in part because warm water takes up more space than cold. The new assessment refines the calculations of the rise in sea level and puts the best estimate at a foot or two, which is actually slightly less than the last assessment in 2001. Though it doesn’t sound like much, a couple of feet is actually a large amount— enough to inundate many low-lying areas and drown much of the earth’s coastal marshes and wetlands. Still, it might be more or less manageable.
During the last eighteen months, however, new research has indicated that a far more rapid rise in sea level may be possible, because the great ice sheets of Greenland and the Antarctic appear to have begun moving more quickly toward the sea. Some of this research appeared in Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth, and James Hansen has written in these pages about this new information[*]; it is responsible for much of the recent increase in the level of alarm. But it is not included in the IPCC report, except as a caveat: “larger values cannot be excluded, but understanding of these effects is too limited to assess their likelihood or provide a best estimate or an upper bound for sea level rise.”
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19981
Worth a read ?
With those two comments, we wait with expectation. Of course there are no glaciers at the north pole but who cares? As long as it captures the attention of the punters, Luke will fantasize.
But let’s wait.
Another vague and boorish homily from Gavin. So tell us, mate, you are rabiting on about instrument calibration, and as we are talking about temperature records, taken off themometers consisting of mercury in a vacuum, which part of the flamin thermometer did you calibrate?
The BoM data all starts at 1910 which, curiously, coincides with the long term temperature minimum and, therefore, exaggerates the extent of the temperature increase.
Note also the reference to carefully selected sites. That is fine for ensuring continuity and consistency in records but, as I have already pointed out, they are not representative of the continental land mass. They are heavily weighted in favour of settlement patterns with Tasmania having the same statistical weight as the NT.
And given that the global mean temperature is already grossly underweight in oceanic station records then this additional bias on the continents further undermines the veracity of the extent of global warming itself.
Note also the high number of stations at airports which have all been paved over the past four decades. And as our friends at Climate Audit have pointed out, the Australian data sets used by Jones to supposedly disprove the heat island effect are still a lot more reliable than the other two sources, pre and post Stalinist USSR and multirevolutionary China. But if our stuff is clearly flawed then just imagine how unreliable the rest of the data is.
Louis you old mountebank – good to see you back. Will you be engaging or doing a runner?
Since renewable groundwater is a hot topic this week, I googled Hisslink’s Eng fellow
Stuart Waters asks
“But is Endersbee right?
The body charged with providing advice regarding the Basin to all levels of government is the Great Artesian Basin Consultative Committee (GABCC). The past Chair of the GABCC’s Technical Working Group, and ex president of the Australian chapter of the International Association of Hydrogeologists, John Hillier, says the Professor is dead wrong.
As more knowledge on water flow directions, water quality and the geological structure has been gained, says Hillier, it has become “obvious that the Great Artesian Basin performs like any other groundwater basin, except that it is much larger”.
“Water enters the sandstone aquifers mostly along the outcrop along the Great Dividing Range in Queensland and New South Wales and flows westwards”.
Raindrops keep falling in my bores
Another past Chair of the Technical Working Group, Jim Kellett, is equally convinced about the nature of the Artesian Basin. “We have irrefutable evidence that the Basin works as we understand it to”, says Kellett.
In support of this claim Kellett refers to the large amount of geochemical and radioisotopic data collected over many years.
“We’ve done Carbon14 and Chlorine36 isotope dating on the water extracted from bores across the basin. These data clearly show an age gradient, with the oldest water being in the centre of the feature, and the youngest being close to the intake zones in the highlands.”
Levels of oxygen and deuterium isotopes have also been analysed in detail. The relative amount of each of these isotopes is like a fingerprint for water, and according to Kellett “the oxygen and deuterium isotopes have the distinctive signature of rainfall”.
In other words, isotopic analysis says that water drawn from the Artesian Basin cannot be ancient water that was formed at the same time as the bedrock strata. Instead it has a definite age gradient and is composed of rainwater.
The age gradient indicates the pace at which water moves through the sandstone strata. Endersbee claims it is implausible for water to move right across the state but the data show that it is moving, albeit at the less than dashing pace of a couple of metres per year. The slow pace of transfer is one of the reasons water pressure can drop where the extraction rate is high. But the fact that it is moving means that the basin will be replenished.
“The evidence is 99.99 repeater per cent in our favour”, Kellett says”.
http://www.abc.net.au/science/slab/groundwater/default.htm
The question is would Turnbull’s mob have a bar of him today?
Ian I fully invite you to take BoM on the reference stations. If you go hunting on this one take a REALLY big knife (Crocodile Dundee!).
Do you know if they do a straight average or spatial weighting?
But if you don’t like reference stations – we can have satellites, ocean temperatures, boreholes, frost frequency, glaciers, species behaviour or phenology. Reckon they’re all wrong?
Again the two references above show really nothing in the UHI business at all.
Reckon it’s Louis out on a dry limb again about to join Ian scratching hey
Ian: Q1 A = the big ones with a steel bulb (mostly).
“They are heavily weighted in favour of settlement patterns with Tasmania having the same statistical weight as the NT” seems you totally missed my point about “flow” at the stations chosen.
Folks Ian’s obsession with heat island effect in BOM data is in complete ignorance of the need for a reasonable air flow at data points. Most of the sites like airports and Capes have no barriers to wind. The ones I knew were in fact some of the most windswept sites on the planet even on a good day.
My most used old fashioned A C calibrator was a pair in a sling. In fact I keep one such instrument in the study for a bit of nostalgia.
It’s a ZEAL made in England to BS2842/66 with WHE 1667 & 1388 hand engraved inserts. The old max min mercury U tube hanging outside which I believe was formerly owned by CSIRO is nowhere near as good.
Endersbee should have heeded the old adage, never send an engineer on a geologist’s job. What I can’t understand is how quickly Louis fell for it, when he is a geologist.
Only for the keen;
the also ran thermometer mentioned above is a sixes type however a google on “mercury in steel thermometer” gives a much wider perspective of the instruments available the science and industry the Russell range is typical of the field I knew. Note the BS what ever for each one
http://www.russell-scientific.co.uk/thermometers/index.html
On general measurement standards:
http://www.measurement.gov.au/index.cfm?event=object.showContent&objectID=91417136-BCD6-81AC-1E2B98E05A258615
In the early 60’s we made a lot of vapor pressure dial thermometers and pressure gauges for Melbourne industry in a guy’s wooden garage from brass and copper tubing. SS types would still be used in breweries and dairies. Guess why.
SJT: working at depth in rock below sea level always raises the big Q where is the all the water coming from?
At KIS under Bass Strait there was plenty of it but was it so salty? I can’t recall. At Renison, Roseberry also Cleavland Tin it was quite fresh and well pressurized but was it straight out of the Indian Ocean? Hobart Labs tested all of it. We should look at their records hey
SJT,
I am, alas a scientist – you ?
Louis
that’s like saying “trust me, I’m a doctor”, when what I need is someone who can do open heart surgery.
What, no response from the doubters on the under representation of oceanic sites and over representation of continental sites in the global mean temperature series? That would be right, a side step here, a shimmy there, anything to avoid the issue.
All Lukes talk about the GM Temp being backed up by other proxies has missed the point. The issue is not whether warming has taken place but, rather, what is the real extent of the change?
But if one is in the exaggeration business, as the IPCC has clearly demonstrated it is, then the current Global Mean Temperature series does exactly what it was designed to do.
And Gavin, spare us this crap about whether one form of thermometer is superior to another. That implies that a fine degree of accuracy is the main issue when it is not. The capacity to record changes as small as 0.01C or not is not an excuse for discounting earlier records. All it means is that the error margin in the calculation of mean temp is smaller.
The issue is unrepresentative sampling and lack of proper weighting which has been sacrificed at the expense of longer, more meaningful data sets.
And the fact that most BoM data sets only start in 1910, at the lowest temperature point in the records is, to an old cynic like me, curiouser and curiouser.
Ian – just be careful – pick too many holes and all this backfires against old cynics too. You get to a point where I’ll argue you know nothing. You can’t suddenly worry about mid-20th century cooling – probably didn’t happen. Etc etc.
So can’t have your cake and eat it too !
It’s not a question of thermometers so much as what enclosures they were in. I’ve had the lecture ! You can be cynical but I seriously believe from the presentations I’ve heard that BoM have made an international class attempt to get a quality reference set of stations going.
Ian given you’re now into “phone a friend” – why not email David Jones in the National Climate Centre and ask him to give you the ducks guts on pre-1910 temps.
In digging around on the pre-1910 issue I found these two excellent presentations which show the exact problem !! Ian nota bene bloody well.
http://www.iac.ethz.ch/people/stefanbr/workshop2006/Trewin_Gwatt2006.pdf
http://www.bom.gov.au/bmrc/clfor/cfstaff/nnn/RMSconf.ppt
Also some great contrarian bashing stuff from Neville Nicholls that I had not previously seen e.g. Antarctic DMS stuff. Nicholls is one of Australia’s most respected meteorologists.
And to add to Antarctica woes.
Surge in carbon levels shows vegetation struggling to cope
· Increased greenhouse gas from trees, plants and soil
· World may warm up more quickly than predicted
David Adam
Friday May 11, 2007
The Guardian
Climate change may have passed a key tipping point that could mean temperatures rising more quickly than predicted and it being harder to tackle global warming, research suggests.
Bristol University researchers say a previously unexplained surge of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere in recent years is due to more greenhouse gas escaping from trees, plants and soils. Global warming was making vegetation less able to absorb the carbon pollution pumped out by human activity.
Such a shift would worsen the gloomy predictions of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which warned last week that there is less than a decade to tackle rising emissions to avoid the worst effects of global warming.
At the moment about half of human carbon emissions are re-absorbed into the environment, but the fear among scientists is that increased temperatures will reduce this effect. Wolfgang Knorr, a climate researcher at Bristol, said: “We could be seeing the carbon cycle feedback kicking in, which is good news for scientists because it shows our models are correct. But it’s bad news for everybody else.”
Measurements of carbon dioxide in samples of air show a sharp increase since the turn of the century, with unusually high levels in four of the past five years. The spike does not seem to match the pattern of increased emissions from fossil fuel burning, and can only be partly explained by natural events such as fires and weather phenomena including El Niño.
Dr Knorr’s team compared the high carbon dioxide measurements in the atmosphere for 2002-03 with simulations of how soils and plants, including trees, behave under different conditions. They found the extra amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could be accounted for by plants taking up less carbon because of unusually dry and hot conditions.
Writing in Geophysical Research Letters, they say: “We find that the remarkable feature of the 2002-03 anomaly seems to be that climate fluctuations – not only related to El Niño and occurring across all latitudes – acted together to create an unusually strong out-gasing of CO2 of the terrestrial biosphere.
“Further research will be required to investigate if this fluctuation carries features of projected future climate change.”
http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,2077118,00.html
HEY old cynic .01 C was never achievable neither was .1C across a whole range of field tests. Hacking for errors in a load of old climate data from your position is a total waste of time. Finding discontinuities in records is also a job for experts. nuf said.
Luke: I could say from my limited survey of current equipment exposed to the web that thermometers have not changed much over the last fifty years except for platinum bulbs that I also turned into reliable instruments. However I will say as always any thermometer is only as good as its user. Those who do not use various calibration routines will not be aware of system faults or improvements. We must see old climate records for what they are
BoM has done some trimming, so what we certainly needed it
Ian: much of my work involved finding system response in rapidly changing environments. Max min over 24 hrs is easy enough. I wound up working with pulse and GHz. Mean energy can be a fleeting thing in any bunch of daily samples but we get by. Sampling techniques is a refined science today.
For the sage, I raised our liquid filled thermometer technology for a very good reason, vapour filled instruments were a bugger to graduate. Liquid is non compressible therefore any thermal expansion is linear as opposed to vapour which is both compressible and non linear. I hoped somebody would see the parallel for liquid behaviour under the ice caps.
Since there can be no steam all the ice must be “floating” even on the Antarctica mainland. Any change in ice upper surface tension cracking etc must allow mass flow. The only question for us is the rate of change of ice movement as an indicator of ice mass temperature.
That’s my new thermometer.
Ha ha Ian if you argue that line too hard you’ll have to accept the variation in historial temp measurements. Remember that’s one of your pet gripes. Painting yourself into a corner.
I have already stated that the issue is representativeness not accuracy. And the only conclusion to be drawn is that we do not have the capacity to adequately determine what the temperature change has been over the past century.
No-one is accusing BoM of fraud or anything. They can only work with high integrity data but the problem is that there is not enough high integrity data to determine, properly, the extent of historical temperature change.
Ian: If “the only conclusion to be drawn is that we do not have the capacity to adequately determine what the temperature change has been over the past century” then we would not be flying etc etc.
Your whole argument as a process is directed as if everybody else is a bunch of idiots but some of us are multi skilled or multi disciplined and as individuals at least have the capacity to respect the growth of knowledge in a particular area that we may not be so familiar with.
It was aeronautical research such as it was downunder that opened my eyes to the skies. In a few hours one day I saw streamline design at the turbine blade level, wind tunnels and fatigue testing then our first electron microscope in operation. It all came long after my uncle first started sending high res b& w photos of our success stories that made it to the air. Putting things together sometimes requires building lots of trust in others.
In the 60’s and 70’s I closely watched the skies over Laverton and saw several of the V bomber type aircraft just out from the UK. Their powered up exhaust x 4 was really something to see. By then I was helping build the cities atmospheric pollution control. Carbon as effluent was everywhere, both solid and invisible forms. Instruments had to be developed to find it all. We commissioned what we had and noticed the change with our eyes.
As systems evolved here and overseas through comparative testing, there was never any doubt in my mind we were still in one way street regarding our effluents world wide. Of course I was also minding our capacity on the input side. Raw materials were always number one for accountants. A close family member did his time in the books of a major oil company and probably knew where every gallon in this country came from or ended up. Some early instrument standards only grew from taxes!
Ian all our instruments were but an aid but the climate guys were hardly in the post war development scrum. However they rested in a long maritime history that also underpinned our aviation world. Thousands of reliable records remain and despite our advance in instrument technology we can use the all the old data in new comparative schemes. IMHO The only dubious data is that where the log books fail to tell us about their actual trials and tribulations with various bits and pieces of the day.
Ian
the natural world is certainly reflecting the effects of climate change. From glaciers to frogs, the changes are apparent.
The Frogs are actually recovering, and from a virus, moron, not declining from climate change.
Tedious and mind numbing though it may be – it is worth reviewing (for those interested) as to what the IPCC ACTUALLY says about the temperature record
http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/AR4WG1_Ch03.pdf
and snow and ice
http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/AR4WG1_Ch04.pdf
See, that’s always your big mistake Luke, posting something of too much substance. 🙂
Scary and mind numbing though it may be, it is worth noting that there are issues with the temperature record globally.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2002…/2002GL014825.shtml
Sorry about doing the ‘Luke’ here,
The abstract reads,
“The United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) temperature database is commonly used in regional climate analyses. However, the raw temperature records in the USHCN are adjusted substantially to account for a variety of potential contaminants to the dataset. We compare the USHCN data with several surface and upper-air datasets and show that the effects of the various USHCN adjustments produce a significantly more positive, and likely spurious, trend in the USHCN data.”
Their conclusion reads,
“We certainly realize that the conterminous United States represents only 1.54 percent of the Earth’s surface area, and analyses of that areal unit may have limited interpretations for any global temperature record. Nonetheless, we show clearly that adjustments made to the USHCN produce highly significant warming trends at various temporal scales. We find that the trends in the unadjusted temperature records are not different from the trends of the independent satellite-based lower-tropospheric temperature record or from the trend of the balloon-based near-surface measurements. Given that no substantial time of observation bias would be contained in either the satellite-based or balloon-based measurements, and given that the time of observation bias is the dominant adjustment in the USHCN database, our results strongly suggest that the present set of adjustments spuriously increase the long-term trend.”
cheers
Arnost
Arnost
in fact it was demonstrated that the satellite data was at fault, and has since been rectified.
SJT
Ummm… Where do satelites come into it? We are talking about surface station raw data – thermometer readings – which are “adjusted”. The point of the paper is that this adjustment may be too high and “spuriously increase the long-term [temperature] trend”.
cheers
Arnost
They say the unadjusted surface records are no different to the satellite data. However, the satellite data has since been demonstrated to be in error.
Arnost Arnost Arnost – my main man.
SJT is correct. Though it may be tedious and mind numbing to cite an RC reference – known to cause blog apoplexy and St Vitus Dance.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=170
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=179
Next !
Happy to move on – just so long as we understand that modern thermometer calibrations appear to be done against computer models rather than another thermometer.
cheers
Arnost
Err no ! what does “that modern thermometer calibrations appear to be done against computer models rather than another thermometer” mean. I’m sure BoM would like to know that when they do their station inspections? Computer models ? Que ??
Are you referring to some processing of the data set or what?
Arnost: Thermometers are always left in boiling water after sucking. Alternativly icewater before the other place
I am not in any way questioning the surface station measurements. Quite the opposite. I am questioning the need for, and the accuracy of, the upward “adjustment” to these when included in the global data set.
Go back to the David Evans thread and have a look at the December NOAA/NCDC v BoM December example I posted there. To put it bluntly, BoM says just about right on 1960-90 average, NCDC says +1-2C.
Proof of this adjustment and how the “climate” community adjusts reality to suit.
If you want, let me know, I can post up the links again.
cheers
Arnost
Can’t seem to find. Pls repost.
Arnost: “upward “adjustment” to these when included in the global data set”
What upward adjustment?
In an attempt to understand your concern I went back to the Evans thread after googling various combinations of your words then WIKI but found nothing of substance anywhere apart from numerous McIntyre Climate Audit grouches.
Are you just the parrot here?
Folks: In this thread I laid some traps to see who was a least part way with me, in understanding some basic measurements.
All recording instruments to have any national and international authorization are calibrated by recognised methods and traceable to standards. When it is seen original standards were not available any recalibration still needs traceability. In practice fresh local standards can be easily found such as the ones I mentioned above to routinely check for gross errors.
I recall climate measurements were not part of NATA but somebody should correct me if they were.
http://www.nata.asn.au/
The big question is; do we think climate science remains out on a limb?
Sorry guys – must have posted this somewhere else and got myself a bit crossed up.
Apologies.
NOAA/NCDC data for December 2006 is here. (Luke – I emailed you an expanded .jpg of it v BoM).
http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/2006/dec/map_blended_mntp_12_2006_pg.gif
BoM data from here
http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/silo/reg/brs/temp_maps_awa.cgi?variable=meananom&area=nat&period=month&time=history&steps=4
You can also change the parameters around to get mean max / min anomalies etc…
Bottom line is – from BoM:
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/month/aus/archive/200612.summary.shtml
“December 2006 in Australia saw few large departures from normal in either rainfall or temperature. Nationally averaged maximum and minimum temperatures were both very close to the 1961−90 normal, with anomalies of −0.01°C (23rd highest since 1950) and +0.06°C (27th highest since 1950) respectively.”
The NOAA/NCDC by comparison has only four spots (out of about 35) that were “normal” or actually cooler than ave. All other areas of Australia were +ve temp anomaly – and about 50% of these at 1-2C.
I am a big fan of BoM – I keep on saying this. But the data it has is not used well by the global guys…
cheers
Arnost
OK now see your issue. Intuitively would trust BoM firstly. Need to understand what went into the NOAA/NCDC analysis – so some fossicking is needed. Will look into.
Arnost we need to see what stations NOAA use compared to BoM. I would suspect BoM would be more up-to-date and importantly what analysis NOAA have done and why compared to BoM.
You can help !
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/Smith-Reynolds-dataset-2005.pdf
We can also email and ask them !
I did this for all the months this year and there appears to be a regular disconnect over central/south Qld. My guess is that becasue of the “rationalisation” (i.e. the homogeniety/duplication issue) the source for NOAA/NCDC for this region is a bit “high” and the interpolation models used to generate the full regional anomaly is skewed by it.
Of interest is that if you go to the GISS page where you can generate equivalents – eastern Aust comes up with “no data”. So have not really been able to make equivalent comparisons.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/maps/
Make sure that you select the 1961-90 base for comparison to BoM’s data if you play around with this.
cheers
Arnost
The key question from this is; If NOAA/NCDC is so far out on a continental temperature series from an OECD country then how far out are they in africa, central and south east asia, south america and all the vast expanse of ocean in between?
You may also be interested to note the Hawaiian records where only the urbanised Honolulu station bears any resemblance to the Mauna Loa CO2 records. Go to http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/
And click on hawaii on the map. This will give you a list of stations. Click in the little asterix in brackets beside Hilo/gen.Lym and it will sort all the stations in order of proximity to this station which is only 30km from Mauna Loa.
This station shows a sequence of level series, at 23.0C from 1910 to 1945, 22.5C from 1945 to 1960 and about 23.4C from 1965 to 2005.
The next complete record is Honolulu which is 350km away and showing the classic upward trend that matches the Mauna Loa CO2 records, but with none of the 1945 to 1965 cooling found in the global mean series.
The next complete record is Lihue, Kauai, 511km from Mauna Loa, with a rise from 1910 to 1945 from 23.5 to 24.0C, followed by a period of wide variation around a level of 23.7C from 1945 to 1970, followed by a level sequence at 24.5 from 1970 to 2005. Again, no similarity to Mauna Loa CO2 records and no similarity to the global mean temperature series.
And one must ask; As the two stations either side of Honolulu have no urban heat island effect, then how many major grid squares in the North Pacific should be allocated to the mean of the two remaining stations records that show no warming at all over the past 35 years?
It should at least have double, if not four times, the weighting of all the mainland USA stations that are currently included in the global mean temperature series.
Now now Ian – let’s not start counting spots. We’re looking at GLOBAL averages here – the Hawaii graphs all trend up – there’s a hiatus mid 20th century. You will have a number of effects – side of island – prevailing weather. Also remember that 1945-1975 is a couple of big negative IPO periods which should also see north Pacific PDO effects.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/03/pnw-snowpack/
But the global averages are heavily weighted towards continental stations, and USA/European ones in particular. The area of ocean over which the hawaiian stations must for the proxy for is at least four times the entire area of the continental USA.
Climate is a function of area, not a function of human settlement patterns, so a global data set must be a function of area, not human settlement patterns.
BTW, one can use the the map at the above link to determine which Australian stations have been included in the global data set. Just click on a state and compare their stations with records extending into 2006/7 with the BoM’s selection.
But don’t they do area weighting. And they have SST analyses too.
See http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/Smith-Reynolds-dataset-2005.pdf
viz
The average reconstruction is broadly consistent with
the average of the input data, but the pattern is
smoother and the anomalies tend to be damped in the
reconstruction.
AND
The simple averages are area-weighted averages of
the 5° superobservations. Since the superobservations
are only defined where there is sampling, which is most
dense in the Northern Hemisphere, area-weighted averages
for the Northern and Southern Hemispheres are
first computed separately, and then they are then averaged.
Each hemispheric average is weighted by the total area in each hemisphere (of land or sea or merged).
Averaging the hemispheres separately first and then
area weighting the results keeps the better-sampled
Northern Hemisphere from artificially dominating the
averages.
Checklist.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
No IPCC, No UN.
“The world is now on track to experience more catastrophic damages from climate change than in the worst-case scenario forecast by international experts, scientists have warned.
The research, published in a prestigious US science journal, shows that between 2000 and 2004 the rate of increase in global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels was three times greater than in the 1990s.
That is faster than even the worst-case scenario modelled by the world’s leading scientists in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, published over recent months, because the updated emissions figures were not available in time to be included.
The climbing emissions mean that average global temperatures are now on track to rise by more than four degrees this century – enough to thaw vast areas of arctic permafrost and leave about 3 billion people suffering from water shortages, including in Australia.”
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/climate-change-bad-to-worse/2007/05/22/1179601340054.html
I am just wondering, Jennifer, what you think of this?
Thanks Luke – you’re a good man.
But what are the implications of the statement, “Reconstructed anomalies damp toward zero in regions with insufficient sampling”?
Dosn’t this still leave us with the same problem of bias towards mainland records but with distinct northern and southern hemisphere output?
I need to go back over the paper in detail yet, but at this stage it didn’t seem clear exactly what products were produced by this process. The ST anomalies maps are one obvious product but is this also used to produce the revised long term global mean temp series? Or are they done seperately?
One more comment,
A couple of posts above, Luke suggested that the satelite data is now alligned to the ground based instruments. I presume it’s based on the following:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1114772v1
The discrepancy was that the satelites had a +0.09 deg. C/decade lower troposphere warming trend, considerably below the surface thermometer estimate that has been hovering around +0.20 deg. C/decade. The Mears & Wentz paper suggested that the “real/adjusted” satelite warming trend was +0.19 deg. C/decade.
However, here are some musings from Roy Spencer from UAH/GHCC where Mears & Wentz themselves suggest that there is an error, and
“As a result, the UAH global temperature trends for the period 1979 to the present have increased from +0.09 to +0.12 deg. C/decade — still below the RSS estimate of +0.19 deg. C/decade.”
http://www.techcentralstation.com/081105RS.html
cheers
Arnost
Some more good stuff on Satelite temperature measurements can be found here:
http://www.climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap1-1/finalreport/sap1-1-final-chap4.pdf
The debate as to which of the RSS +0.19 deg. C/decade since 1979 or the newer UAH +0.12 deg. C/decade is more correct is of course a subject of debate that I won’t even touch.
The observation that I would like to make is that the GISS/NOAA adjustments to instrumental surface records now fit very nicely with the GISS series. If these adjustments are not made, then the it’s a beter fit if the UAH series is used – it is also a better fit with the baloon / radiosonde data.
A good visual compared to HadCRU global temps is in the bottom graph here:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/hadleycentre/CR_data/Monthly/upper_air_temps.gif
The GISS global temps are of course higher and a much better fit with the RSS trend.
cheers
Arnost
Luke – been “fossicking”.
Though this does not explain the adjustments to GHCN, focusing mostly on USHCN, it shows that the “adjustment” is on the order +0.5F. (It is interesting that a downward UHI adjustment is ony 0.1F).
If these adjustments are equally applied to the global network, this will in some way go to explain the difference between BoM and NOAA. (There is still a gap from my reckoning).
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/ushcn/ushcn.html
What I find concerning is that the rate of adjustment has increased since 1950. I wonder why? Surely the accuracy of the instruments would have increased thus requiring less adjustment? The adjustment is the trend – in itself explains almost half of the global warming since the 50’s.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/ushcn/ts.ushcn_anom25_diffs_urb-raw_pg.gif
Food for thought
cheers
Arnost
Recommend you email them and engage directly. Worth knowing.
Very interesting Arnost, and that explanation of at least half the warming (if its a valid explanation…and it seems plausible), when coupled with the solar effect that is considered to represent 30-50 % of the increase, kinda makes you question co2 doesnt it?
Toby – don’t get too excited and count your chickens here. You think the IPCC science panel is that dumb? Maybe Arnost is right but are you that quick to jump on any idea that washes past.
Australia on high quality BoM data is still warming as are many other independent indicators.
I’m stunned by your penchant to say “oh that must be it then”. Jump !!
P.S. WHAT solar effect?? How does it work?
Toby
The reason I began this digging is that there was a disconnect between solar / temp in the eighties or so, and I knew that there was a bit of temp adjustment happening.
Saying that, I accept that corrections may, and in fact should be made. However, I don’t really like the fact that the corrections are made such that the result is that temperatures are incrementally increased timewise. It would be more logical to apply the correction as a step (or a series of steps). This would not mask the underlying trends in observed data.
Also – why aren’t there any corrections to the pre 50’s data where logically you would expect much higher instrumentation and reading errors / biases?
Apparently the data for version 2 (more current) will be available in July this year. But then it will be only for the US network. As Luke says, will probably have to ask NOAA directly for the GHCN network effects.
cheers
Arnost
Luke I said it sounded plausible…..as for the solar effect…..
Embarrasingly I can not find the NASA site I was reading a few months ago, but if my memory serves me correctly they were suggesting approx 0.3c of warming in the last 100 or so years would be expected due to reduced sunspot activity causing increased radiation. They also noted that we were not really sure how this radiation would impact on cloud formation.
I will try and find it tomorrow evening, I have to go to bed, I have a big day ahead.
Must admit I thought it was agreed some of the increase in temp related to this factor ( note I said some, my reading made it clear it did not account for teh majority)? Is that not the case? I certainly mentioned it before and you havent questioned it.
Arnost I also wonder why they have needed to make more adjustments since the 1950’s as measurements presumably are more accurate as you suggest….and fewer before when they were less so!
Regards T
Toby
No idea on the NASA / solar but this is a good read WRT solar and clouds.
http://www.sciencebits.com/CO2orSolar
Mike Alexander’s posts at the end of the thread may have however stumped Nir – it’s interesting that he has not answered…
cheers
Arnost
What have we learned? What I find amazing is the international discussion on raw data reconstruction still goes on a pace.
Luke had me thinking deeply again with his link to the Smith & Reynolds temp reconstruction paper 2005. Near the end is a classic but practical statement that was so familiar in terms of my own attitude to endless math routines for old data points. In the low frequency sampling error parra we find this “The magnitude of the trend needs to be about right “ That’s so significant.
For many years I watched recordings on man made environments for such things as dryness and wetness. All in all, regular max min temp indication was hardly worth the worry as energy is not directly related. If I was ever sidetracked wondering about trends from either peaks or bottoms then I could give that game away. Something our thermometers can’t do is record the energy involved with latent heat
I do frequent early rises. Our biggest chill is routinely just before dawn, why? Years ago I watched for “black ice” forming on the roads. That’s the point when dampness oozing across the surface turns the place into a battle field. The other argument is about evaporation. Luke may recall I chat a lot about the ice point, 0 C and liquid mass interchange.
Heat exchangers and signal transducers were my bread and butter. Arnost’s link brought it all back. It seems the US astrologers loved their max min records but I bet much of it was driven by their farmers, oh dear I must note we have one or two here. But the NOAA history discussion and QA type procedures, strengths weaknesses etc is quite revealing.
Early on I identified sloppy max min u tube devices. In practice I carried about ten NATA reg straight thermometers, three for each range. Readings with any less than three was immediately open to suspicion. My selection were better than most. Interestingly enough though any ten thermometers had accumulated errors in deg C at boiling point equal to about half their number.
How any one can swear on an old reading still amuses me. Reading the damn things was ever an art not a science. Finding trends without maths was another business.
Happy hunting.
Luke the solar effect and its impact …..found this
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Library/SORCE/sorce_04.htmlis today