You ask, I provide. November 2nd, 1922. Arctic Ocean Getting Warm; Seals Vanish and Icebergs Melt.

“For example, during the previous 60 years (since the 1940s) arctic SAT trends are positive and are very large in the 1990s. However, arctic temperatures in the 1930-40s were exceptionally high, so trends calculated from the 1920s forward the data show a small but statistically significant cooling tendency.”
http://www.frontier.iarc.uaf.edu/~igor/research/amplif/index.php

Does anyone know of any independent confirmation of this news report?
REPLY: The news article cites according to a report to the Commerce Department from Consul Geroge N. Ifft, at Bergen, Norway. Somebody should be able to back track it.

Thank you Mr. Watts for this hot “news”. “in some places the seals are finding the waters too hot” – in 1922. Sounds very much like the autumn season – but 85 years later! And after a cold winter, the warmists now spotted a leak of warm air into the arctic region and just reported about drowning young seals in the Northern Baltic Sea because of thin ice. But they did not report about the record recovery of the rest of the arctic sea ice. Cherry picking? You bet!

The article is consistent with temperature records from northernmost weather stations.
I really would like to see an estimate of climate change based on records from known good weather stations.

Of course, the alarmists will say that the melting of 1922 was due to natural causes, while the present one is anthropogenic!

The New York Time (AKA: The Old Gray Lady), America’s Newspaper of Record, confirmed the story on Sunday February 25, 1923.
REPORT THE ARCTIC IS GETTING WARMER; Explorers and Fishermen Find Climate Moderating About Spitzbergen. FIRST NOTED ABOUT 1918 Old Glaciers Have Disappeared — Changes in Flora and Fauna.
February 25, 1923, Sunday
Section: EDITORIAL SECTION, Page E6, 696 words
The Arctic seems to be warming up. Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers who sail the seas about Spitzbergen and the Eastern Arctic, all point to a radical change in climatic conditions, and hitherto unheard of temperatures in that part of the earth. Old glaciers have disappeared and land once covered with field ice is bare.
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F00F13F7395516738DDDAC0A94DA405B838EF1D3
As one would expect from the National Newspaper of Record, additional details are provide including the fact that the changes were first observed in 1918. There are enough details that we may be able to located research papers by a Dr. Adolf Holt of the University of Christiana in Norway. The research was funded by the Norwegian Department of Commerce. Can a reader in Norway located papers published by Dr. Holt in the early 1920’s?
The report reads like a Greenpeace press release!
I have the PDF which I will Email to Anthony.
Mike

That’s a great link to the NYT search engine, Michael. Wish I had a subscription to read the whole articles! Some of the first paragraphs have startling similarities to today’s headlines!
This one caugh my eye from 1930:
A NEW CHAPTER WRITTEN BY THE GLACIER
WORD comes from Switzerland that the Alpine glaciers are in full retreat. Out of 102 glaciers observed by Professor P.L. Mercanton of the University of Lausanne and his associates more than twothirds have been found to be shrinking.
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F50B16FC3D5F11738DDDA80A94DA415B808FF1D3&scp=44&sq=warming+arctic&st=p
1935: Glaciers retreat at twice normal:
GLACIERS’ EBB SPED BY HOT ’34 SUMMER; Last Remnants of Ice Age Are Receding at Double-Time, Geologists Are Told.
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F70C15F73B5D167A93CAAB178FD85F418385F9&scp=6&sq=glaciers&st=p

How much of this stuff from the past lines up with PDO shifts?
REPLY: Good question, we’ll take a look

More from Dr. Adolf Hoel on polar ice and sun spots.
POLAR ICE-DRIFT AND SUN SPOTS.
By GEORGEN ICOLAISF FT, American Coned.
[Bergen, Norway, Dec. 6,1922.1
http://docs.lib.noaa.gov/rescue/mwr/050/mwr-050-12-0631b.pdf
We need to get all of Dr. Hoel’s research papers! There are some in JStore which I can order.
Here is a partial list:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&safe=active&q=%22Adolf+Hoel%22&btnG=Search
I am really starting to like Dr. Hoel!
Mike

This is very interesting. George Nicolas Ifft was the American consul in Bergen Norway. Amongst his responsibilities was to file reports with the State Department in Washington D.C., some of which were published in the Monthly Weather Review. In today terms, Mr. Ifft was a State Department Intelegance Officer.
THE CHANGING ARCTIC.
By George Nicolas Ifft
[Under data of October 10, 1922, the American consul at Bergen Norway, submitted the following report to the State Department, Washington, D.C.]
http://docs.lib.noaa.gov/rescue/mwr/050/mwr-050-11-0589a.pdf
The Washington Post story was published on November 2nd, 1922, so this October 10, 1922, State Department report is the most likely the un-attributed source of the Associated Press report. This could also have been a deliberate plant by the State Department.
Just as today’s nations north of the Arctic Circle have territorial ambitions in an ice free Arctic, Norway may have had ulterior motives for funding Dr. Adolf Hoel’s voyages of discovery. This would also explain the State Department’s interest in Dr. Adolf Hoel.
The report in Wikipedia on Adolf Hoel confirms these suspicions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hoel
There are other reports on the Internet which I am investigating, pertaining to Norway’s territorial ambitions in the Arctic.
Mike

Of course, the Y2K error, pointed out by Steve McIntire last summer and which reorganised the warmest year chart for the USA, doesn’t apply to the rest of the world and MWP was a local event.

Ya know, I’m not surprised:
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2004/11/15/predictable-distortion/#more-21
😉

Neill~ Before I moved to Canada, the mail-order pharmacy I was working at was still shipping meds to Jerry Garcia. We figure he was with Elvis. Yogi might just be hanging out with them, ya know?

I’m going to disappoint people on both sides of this issue. First, Although we live on the cooled, dry, crust of a volcanic planet we tend not to see things, events, in terms of, say, geologic time or time frames that can actually tell us something. Evaluating what is happening now, such as global warming, by looking at the last 150 years to present is not a lot of help so sure, we get misleading information on the subject. Yeah, yippee, we don’t have to get off our lazy cans and actually do something, like act environmentally responsible. Or do we? Here’s the inescapable truth and it will bum some folks out. While we may or may not be the direct cause of global warming, our planet and everything associated with it is part of a balanced system. Any impacts to it will have positive or negative effects which will, in turn, help or harm us; the latter being more the case. There is not one molecule of evidence to suggest that we, humans, have a positive impact on the planet. In terms of that, a seagull has more benefit . It is, therefore, a “good bet” that climate change is real and in part associated with us. The question is: how much is really us and can anything be done about it before future generations – our children, are harmed or even devastated by it. Can we change in a way that will ensure future generations a chance at life without global famine, starvation, poverty, societal collapse and strife? What are we working towards? What are you working towards?
We can play some one-upsmanship on the issue or we can try for a better future whether we are “warming” or not.

What are we working towards? Scientific knowledge, and ultimately, Truth, which is the exact opposite of what the AGWers want. AGW is a huge lie, and lies are the basis for totalitarian governments.

For someone who was long dead before the Internet, George Nicolas Ifft has quite a data trail in Google. Apparently he and other State Department consuls were expected to file detailed reports about the countries in which they served.
Two spelling of his name appear in Google, which has already indexed my earlier post on Mr. Ifft.
Here are the records for the George Nicolas Ifft.
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22George+Nicolas+Ifft%22&hl=en&safe=active&filter=0
Most of these the reports for George Nicholas Ifft appear to be family members but some are of interest to us.
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22George+Nicholas+Ifft%22&hl=en&safe=active&filter=0
The reporting levels from consuls were so extensive that the New York Times took note of the fact in 1914.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9D04E4D61E39E633A25753C1A9639C946596D6CF
“MOVIES” REIGN EVERYWHERE; Reports from All Over the World Show They Stand High in Popular Favor.
May 10, 1914, Sunday
Section: Magazine, Page SM5, 774 words
AMERICAN Consuls in European and other foreign countries have recently been sending reports to Washington on the motion picture industry, these reports showing that east and west, north and south, the “movies” now hold sway and are playing a star role in the amusements of the nations.
Even the transatlantic travels of the Ifft family are recorded between Europe and their home in Pocatello Idaho.
http://www.ellisislandrecords.org/search/matchMore.asp?kind=exact&FNM=&LNM=ifft&x=53&y=3&dwpdone=1
The reports of consuls could be an interesting source of firsthand information on many subjects.
Mike

I drew a line on top of the August 16th, 2007 ice extent at 81deg 29minutes:
http://img186.imageshack.us/img186/8093/summer2007lh3.png
As you can see there is no way a boat would have reported ice free waters at that latitude in August 2007. The comparison even gets worse if you look at recent cooler years such as 2000.
Frankly, I was surprised at the result and I expected the 2007 melt to be much further than the melt in 1922. The fact that it is even close suggests that the recent melt of the arctic ice may not be as unprecedented as many people claim.
REPLY: Raven are you sure of the image you created? Thinking of making a new post around it and other info I? have. -Anthony

It was a quick mock up eyeballing on my screen with google earth so the error bars are at least +/-0.5 deg. It was a good faith effort and I did not intentionally cherry pick. To do something worthy of seperate post it would be best to sort out when exactly they collected their data and plot their trip. This could all be put on a google earth map file. I would be willing to look at doing this. You can send me an email if you want to discuss further.
(you don’t need to post this message on the forum).

Those wishing to explore the topic of Arctic conditions in the 1930s might research the “Second International Polar Year”, which I believe was 1933.

One more Monthly Weather Review short article on Arctic ice, from 1930:
http://docs.lib.noaa.gov/rescue/mwr/059/mwr-059-05-0202c.pdf

Here is a google earth file with overlays for the August sea ice for 1980 and 2002: http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=1134236&page=0&vc=#Post1134236
The ice extent data comes from here:
http://nsidc.org/data/g02169.html
The data only goes up to 2002, however, the 1980 and 2002 clearly demostrated that the ice extent in 1922 was comparable to recent times and that the arctic ice extent increased between 1922 and 1980.

I’m a newby here. Will someone post a link to what the Mann hockey stick looks like after McKitric and McIntyre’s statistical corrections are applied? Actually, a before and after would be better. Thanks.
REPLY: I don’t hae the graph here, but check on http://www.climateaudit.org and post the same message on unthreaded #32 there and you’ll get a response.

MIKE (and the others who are interested in the Norwegian political expansionist angle): the Norwegian ambassador to the US covering this period (he was in office 1910 – 1927) was Helmer Halvorsen Bryn – my great-grandfather. He played a key role in negotiating Norwegian control of the coal in Spitzbergen. The Norwegian explorer Fritjof Nansen also got involved in US-Norwegian government negotiations. Perhaps if you search around a bit including the name Bryn or “HH Bryn” or variants, you will find more.

Guys, I gotta tell you, I’ve been playing around with the links that Bruce posted a few days ago from the GISS site. I’ve been searching for long term (at least 1900-2000) rural data. There is very very little to find. A whole bunch of stations start in the 1940s and 1950s. Of the few stations I found in the GISS network that have data covering the entire 20th century, nearly every one of them has the 1920s-1930s as warm, if not warmer, than the current period. Which begs the question how they have determined the global temperature was so much less in that period compared to today when all the data I can find covering that period says it’s roughly the same?

Raven, is data like this: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=431043600000&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
corrected or uncorrected?
What I’ve been doing is going here:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/
and clicking on various places in each continent and looking for long-term data listed as “rural”, or most with a small population. Almost 100% of the rural records covering the 20th century show the 1920s-1930s as warm or warmer than the 1990s-2000s. The only long-term data that shows any significant trend is limited to extremely large urban areas like Tokyo: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=210476620003&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1

There is data on NH ice extent which goes back to 1870. See here for a discussion and analysis of that data.
The recent arctic melt breaks records over the entire dataset.
REPLY: That post is a bit stale, there’s no mention of the recent rebound and heading positive anomaly of arctic sea ice extent in it.

This brings up the questions you must always ask the Global Warming Scare Mongers: Given that the earth has been cooler and warmer than it now is, what should be the temperature of the earth? How will we know when we have reached the right temperature?

Speaking of deltas, isn’t the accumulation of 11 km^2 of NH ice unprecedented?

Interesting how the Northern Hemisphere ice extents back to the 1880’s demonstrated in Taminos post here especially this image seems to follow pretty well with PDO and solar irradiance as you posted here .
Although pre-satellite data is not going to be nearly as accurate, so who knows what the true numbers are.

Anthony,
The Northern Hemisphere ice may not (yet) have a positive anomaly (relative to 1978-2000 mean), but globally, sea ice is at a positive anomaly.
REPLY: That is true.

Anthony, great post. I am new to your site, having been at Bretts site (accuweather) for a while. I sent your 1922 article with your link to everyone in my address book.
I did a quick search and did not see the following mentioned here? I found it quite interesting and I apologize if it is a repeat.
Dr. Gerhard Loebert:
A Compilation of the Arguments that Irrefutably Prove that Climate Change is driven by Solar Activity and not by CO2 Emission
Dr. Gerhard Loebert, Otterweg 48, 85598 Baldham, Germany. March 6, 2008.
Physicist. Recipient of The Needle of Honor of German Aeronautics.
Program Manager “CCV, F 104G” (see Internet).
Program Manager “Lampyridae, MRMF” (see Internet)
Conveyor of a super-Einsteinian theory of gravitation that explains, among many other post-Einstein-effects, the Sun-Earth-Connection and the true cause of the global climate changes.
I. Climatological facts
As the glaciological and tree ring evidence shows, climate change is a natural phenomenon that has occurred many times in the past, both with the magnitude as well as with the time rate of temperature change that have occurred in the recent decades. The following facts prove that the recent global warming is not man-made but is a natural phenomenon.
1. In the temperature trace of the past 10 000 years based on glaciological evidence, the recent decades have not displayed any anomalous behaviour. In two-thirds of these 10 000 years, the mean temperature was even higher than today. Shortly before the last ice age the temperature in Greenland even increased by 15 degrees C in only 20 years. All of this without any man-made CO2 emission!
2. There is no direct connection between CO2 emission and climate warming. This is shown by the fact that these two physical quantities have displayed an entirely different temporal behaviour in the past 150 years. Whereas the mean global temperature varied in a quasi-periodic manner, with a mean period of 70 years, the CO2 concentration has been increasing exponentially since the 1950’s. The sea level has been rising and the glaciers have been shortening practically linearly from 1850 onwards. Neither time trace showed any reaction to the sudden increase of hydrocarbon burning from the 1950’s onwards.
3. The hypothesis that the global warming of the past decades is man-made is based on the results of calculations with climate models in which the main influence on climate is not included. The most important climate driver (besides solar luminosity) comes from the interplay of solar activity, interplanetary magnetic field strength, cosmic radiation intensity, and cloud cover of the Earth atmosphere. As is shown in Section II, this phenomenon is generated by the action of galactic vacuum density waves on the core of the Sun.
4. The extremely close correlation between the changes in the mean global temperature and the small changes in the rotational velocity of the Earth in the past 150 years (see Fig. 2.2 of http://www.fao.org/DOCREP/005/Y2787E/y2787e03.htm), which has been ignored by the mainstream climatologists, leaves little room for a human influence on climate. This close correlation results from the action of galactic vacuum density waves on the Sun and on the Earth (see Section II). Note that temperature lags rotation by 6 years.
5. From the steady decrease of the rotational velocity of the Earth that set in in Dec. 2003, it can reliably be concluded that the mean Earth temperature will decrease again in 2010 for the duration of three decades as it did from 1872 to 1913 and from 1942 to 1972.
6. The RSS AMSU satellite measurements show that the global temperature has not increased since 2001 despite the enormous worldwide CO2 emissions. Since 2006 it has been decreasing again.
II. Physical explanation for the strong correlation between fluctuations of the rotational velocity and changes of the mean surface temperature of the Earth
Despite its great successes, the gravitational theory of the great physicist Albert Einstein, General Relativity, (which is of a purely geometric nature and is totally incompatible with the highly successful quantum theory) must be discarded because this theory is completely irreconcilable with the extremely large energy density of the vacuum that has been accurately measured in the Casimir experiment.
Seaon Theory, a new theory of gravitation based on quantum mechanics that was developed eight decades after General Relativity, not only covers the well-known Einstein-effects but also shows up half a dozen post-Einstein effects that occur in nature. From a humanitarian standpoint, the most important super-Einsteinian physical phenomenon is the generation of small-amplitude longitudinal gravitational waves by the motion of the supermassive bodies located at the center of our galaxy, their transmission throughout the Galaxy, and the action of these waves on the Sun, the Earth and the other celestial bodies through which they pass. These vacuum density waves, which carry with them small changes in the electromagnetic properties of the vacuum, occur in an extremely large period range from minutes to millennia.
On the Sun, these vacuum waves modulate the intensity of the thermonuclear energy conversion process within the core, and this has its effect on all physical quantities of the Sun (this is called solar activity). This in turn has its influences on the Earth and the other planets. In particular, the solar wind and the solar magnetic field strength are modulated which results in large changes in the intensity of the cosmic radiation reaching the Earth. Cosmic rays produce condensation nuclei so that the cloud cover of the atmosphere and the Earth albedo also change.
On the Earth, the steady stream of vacuum density waves produces parts-per-billion changes in a large number of geophysical quantities. The most important quantities are the radius, circumference, rotational velocity, gravitational acceleration, VLBI baseline lengths, and axis orientation angles of the Earth, as well as the orbital elements of all low-earth-orbit satellites. All of these fluctuations have been measured.
Irrefutable evidence for the existence of this new, super-Einsteinian wave type is provided by the extremely close correlation between changes of the mean temperature and fluctuations of the mean rotational velocity of the Earth. (see the figure referred to in Section I.4). Einsteinian theory cannot explain this amazing correlation between two physical quantities that seem to be completely unrelated.
While the rotational velocity of the Earth and the thermonuclear energy conversion process on the Sun react simultaneously to the passage of a vacuum density wave, a time span of 6 years is needed for the energy to be transported from the core of the Sun to the Earth’s atmosphere and for the latter’s reaction time.
As can be seen, super-Einsteinian gravitation reveals the true cause of climate change.
REPLY: It is the music of the spheres, interconected.

1999:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/286/5446/1934
“Surface and satellite-based observations show a decrease in Northern Hemisphere sea ice extent during the past 46 years.”
Isn’t it interesting that Tamino claims NH sea ice has been declining since 1965 … and this paper says NH Sea Ice has been declining since 1933.
I guess AGW works better if you don’t point
You know … if Tamino said the sky was blue, I would check.
An alternative point of view:
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2007/10/30/arctic-sea-ice-another-hockey-stick/
“But, despite these shortcomings, it is interesting to note that the Russian reconstruction includes a far greater degree of interdecadal variation, including a large decline from 1900 to the 1940s, a recovery from the 1940s into the late 1960s (quite possibly underestimated due to insufficient data during the early part of this period), and a then a subsequent decline to the present.”

I live in the Far North, and I agree with Robert Norwood — people can play endless games of one-upmanship, or they can plan for living in an environ-ment which does not have the same degree of climate stability that we have historically enjoyed. Some years ago, NOVA had a great graphic on climate change — they showed a timeline going back to about 8,000 BC, with all the peaks and valleys of climate variability. THEN, they extended the line back to about 30,000 BC. Guess what ? In comparison, the line back to 8,000 BC looked FLAT. Temperatures were so much more variable before that time that agriculture would have been virtually impossible. A great visual.
About 1000AD, the ice along the arctic coast melted so fast that the Inuit, who had dog sled technology, were able to follow whales which moved north and it only took the Inuit about 100-200 years to get from the west coast of Alaska clear to Greenland, replacing the more sedentary Dorset as they went. Then the ice closed in again, but the Inuit were established. At that same time, the Norsk were settling Iceland and Greenland, but had to abandon Greenland when the climate chilled down.
The thing is, we don’t know what to expect, but we have built a very complex society based on an expectation of continuance of the norm. Living in the Far North requires one to adapt to the most extreme changes on a yearly basis. In the old days it meant adapt or die. Now it means adapt or fly away to somewhere more clement. But up here we realize that climate change may mean more extremes in every direction, not just ‘global warming’. THAT is what people should prepare for.
And arctic ice ‘rebound’ is first-year ice, thin and easily melted, unlike the thick, dense multi-year ice which disappeared so dramatically in 2007. I think this melting is being driven by suboceanic magma flow myself.

No offense but global warming has it coming and I have alot of anger at this threat while the big oil giants continue to get rich and we suffer constantly worrying about the future.Global warming is DEAD as well as the threatened results such as a ice free arctic,milder winters,hotter summers,& stronger hurricanes but not many blizzards.
All that can go the way as the dinosaurs! Now bring on the ice age!