I see Mr. Watts’ original post complained the authors did check the hypothesis that volcanoes had heated up the atmosphere in the West Antarctica. This hypothesis is easily disproved…

Paul, you should brush up on your geography. The Antarctic peninsula that has warmed is connected by the same tectonic plate to Tierra del Fuego [Land of Fire, get
it?]: click

If you use your noggin, Paul, you will see that volcanic activity occurs along the edges of tectonic plates. Is it so hard to understand that the same process that causes volcanic activity in Tierra del Fuego also causes volcanic activity in the attached Antarctic peninsula?

It has nothing to do with CO2 or AGW. The simplest explanation is almost always the correct explanation: if the “Land of Fire” less than 500 miles away has lots of volcanoes, it’s very likely that the peninsula in question has the same volcanic influence.

In my opinion, Dr. Steig shoud embrace the opportunity to demonstrate the strength of his science.

Check out the NY Times blog Tierney Lab that several posters show how ridiculous this claim is:
http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/23/volcanoes-and-antarctic-warming/

Interesting… Just last year there was a bunch of nonsense pushed by pseduo-pretend ‘scientist’ bloggers that the Arctic ice cap was being melted by volcanoes. It was widely picked up by the right wing news media types.
They ended up with egg on their faces.

Interesting that Mr. Watts has attempted the same propaganda technique to explain the Antarctic atmospheric (!!!!) warming this year. At the same time, Mr. Watts is claiming in this blog post that the Antarctic isn’t warming.

Well, which is it? Is the Antarctic warming or not? And does Mr. Watts believe that volcanoes is responsible for the warming over the last 50 years?

REPLY: The satellite sensor used in the study is an AVHRR. The differences measured are minute. So tell me then, what happens to heat from a volcanically active area? Where does it go? And can you see such things from space using a satellite platform?

Well it appears you can, see this peer reviewed paper: http://www.terrapub.co.jp/journals/EPS/pdf/2002/5403/54030211.pdf They used LANDSAT for this one.

here’s another: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/10/041005071329.htm

Granted these are near surface events, and the West Antarctica volcanic area is mostly beneath the ice. But then, we also don’t know what it looks like beneath that ice and what sort of activity is going on, or to what extent those areas are releasing heat or not. It has not been mapped. And, like the two examples above, the only way heat leaves our planet is as longwave IR to space, be it heat from the sun (shortwave to longwave conversion by ground heating) or from magma sources. It all goes “up” to space eventually. Heat will migrate through ice also, it doesn’t have to melt the ice, only to change it’s temperature. With the AVHRR looking at that area, where does that volcanic heat dissipate to? Does it go to the oceans, and none is transferred to the ice above at all? Is it split 50/50, does most of it go directly upwards, eventually to be radiated into space as LWIR? I think these are valid questions.

It is important to note, that in this study (as I understand it) the AVHRR is measuring the surface skin temperature, not the air temperature. It is looking at the radiative value of the land surface.

So the valid question to ask yourself in this Antarctica paper is: I’m looking at satellite data of an IR sensor trained on a known volcanically active region of the planet. Have I fully excluded the possibility that any portion of that data is a part of that region’s volcanic heat? Since the paper made no mention of it, I’ll have to assume they did not even consider it. Science is mostly about excluding other possibilities. What you are left with then is (hopefully) the truth of the matter. If they can show me how they excluded the possibility from the paper, I’ll be happy to post a new story about it.

- Anthony

REPLY: Still no comment then on this?

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/01/27/james-hansens-former-nasa-supervisor-declares-himself-a-skeptic-says-hansen-embarrassed-nasa-was-never-muzzled/

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/01/27/james-hansens-former-nasa-supervisor-declares-himself-a-skeptic-says-hansen-embarrassed-nasa-was-never-muzzled/

REPLY: “environmental bog” ? Mark, you might want to read this, and then rephrase:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/01/27/james-hansens-former-nasa-supervisor-declares-himself-a-skeptic-says-hansen-embarrassed-nasa-was-never-muzzled/

Anthony Watts

Thank you for your effort at RC, and important questions put to Chris V.

Volcanoes under the ice can’t affect climate on the surface, 2 miles above!

.. but if you follow the link in the story, you find ..

For Antarctica, “This is the first time we have seen a volcano beneath the ice sheet punch a hole through the ice sheet,” Dr. Vaughan said.

Chris V: The RC post says that 35-45 was the warmest temperatures for the century. Why is the short warming period from 58 to 69 more important than the cooling from 45 to 58 or the cooling from 69 to present?

The problem with the paper for me is the use of a process that is known to introduce a warming bias (that may not be an issue for the AWG crowd) and cherry picking a start point that give the trend that supports your position.

Most of my concern is that they say they removed data, without saying what they replaced it with. I would be skeptical of any such removal of data, regardless of whether it would warm or cool the data. Since they indicate their biases toward warming in past papers, I suspect that they would have been more likely to catch cooling influences than warming. (Note: I am not accusing them of lying, rather I am accusing them of bias, something we all have. It is difficult for most of us to avoid being trapped by our biases).

“Clouds re-radiate heat back to the ground at night…”

This may often be true, but one look at the Siberian weather stations shows that it may not always be true. They have a condition where ice fog forms during their dark winter, and the temperature becomes dreadfully cold. I don’t know if this occurs in Antarctica, and Steig et al (2008) don’t seem to discuss what happens under the clouds in their paper.