From this it is to be expected that the northern areas of the world would be warming if all other factors remained the same.

One would therefore expect the data on the antarctic to be a better indicator than that of the arctic.

(UHI)?
(A) Three. One to order the barbecue, one to poke the steaks with the thermometer and

one whom publishes in a peer-reviewed paper that novel, advanced statistical

analysis conclusively prove that there was no barbecue and thus UHI is no more than a

denialist artefact!
(Q) How many does it take to demonstrate that the UHI effect matters when determining

climatic change?
(A) Lots and lots and lots of people- all rowing in the same direction- thanks Mr

Watts!
(Q) How many Canadians are required to illustrate that more effective symbiosis

betwixt claim-atolgy(sp?) and applied statistics would do us all a great favour?
(A) I believe just the one- SMc!

Sorry, Mr Watts, for being totally Off-Target but as much as I’m impressed by the

views and knowledge of the majority of the posters on the current topic- I’m more

than a tad depressed with the overwhelming,’majority’ consensus that time after time

simply ‘steam-rollers’ and demonises alternative viewpoints into the tarmac!

I suspect that there must be a natural limit to arctic ice area simply because it doesn’t stay dark for so very long once you get out of the Arctic Circle, hence limiting summer ice latitudes pretty permanently short of extreme cooling.

Volume, however, I tend to agree with you. Key there is getting the measurement mechanisms set up. I think various projects are looking to start doing that now – monitoring that for 100 years will be very helpful.

40 year wind cycles: I suspect you will find a lot of 25 – 70 year cycles operating through multiple climatic parameters – I had a look at NCDC annual data for precipitation and temperature for US and there are clear cycles operating across those lengths in some, but by no means all US states. These overlap:

e.g.
California 1910 – 1975 cold; 1980 onwards hot.
Washington 1920 – 1985 cold; 1985 onwards warm.
Colorado 1903 – 1930 cold; 1931 – 1960 warm; 1964 – 1990 cold; 1990 onwards warm.
Florida 1960 – 1988 cold; 1989 onwards warm.

Minnesota 1912 – 1939 dry; 1977 to present wet.
Pennsylvania 1900 – 1930 dry; 1970 to present wet.

That’s a very crude first pass data examination.

Nature 451, 286-288 (17 January 2008) | doi:10.1038/nature06590; Published online 16 January 2008

Not at all it is a perfectly proper question and I will attempt to answer it to the best of my ability.

In theory sea level should be constant around the globe, but until recently this idea was the subject of great dispute until the cutting of the Suez canal between two seas showed it was essentially correct.

But the sea is subject to waves and mean sea level is affected in the short term, days, weeks or months, by the winds which can pile up water in enormous quantities, and by the local pressure of the atmosphere which can depress or increase the level significantly for years or more.

Similarly you might imagine that the ripples in water or the waves in which you paddle which can grow into mighty breakers are local events but even the tides themselves are waves driven by the gravitational forces of the heavenly bodies and the rotation of the earth. Although close to the equator they travel at around a thousand miles an hour you do not perceive them as a wave, merely a local rise and fall in sea level. Moreover they do not affect seas largely closed off from the oceans such as the Baltic where the tidal range is a few inches. Whereas off the West Coast of Ireland it is tens of feet.

So measuring mean sea level is a hard thing to do and up until now the best method we have are tidal gauges, But these have only been around for a couple of hundred years. Moreover they are subject to the fact that the land can and does rise or fall, over hundreds of years.

Within the limitations we have of measuring mean sea level we can, with a reasonable degree of certainty estimate it has been rising by about 2 mm a year for the last thousand years: in the last twenty years we have had satellite date some of which suggest this may have increased to 3mm a year but it is not clear whether this is true, or due to errors in measurement or local barometric effects.

Similarly due to their geology the East and South coasts of England suffer from relatively rapid rates of erosion, deposition and sinkage. Within the last six hundred years once great ports such as Dunwich or Rye have been left high and dry but this has little or nothing to do with mean sea levels.

If mean sea level continues to rise at the current rate we might expect it to be between two and three hundred mm higher by the end of the century.

So I hope this answers your question.

Kindest Regards.

Roger E. Sowell
Marina del Rey, California (still raining, this is day 4 in a row)

“recent anthropological work in northern Greenland have revealed Eskimo settlements and ancient sea shores that show a sea level more than a meter higher 800-1000 years ago compared with now.”

Does this imply that 800-1000 years ago the sea level was a metre higher evrywhere?
How does this compare with the Roman harbours on the south coast of England (of 2000 years ago), I was told as a child that silting had caused them to be now inland or strangely elevated ?

Sorry – could be a totally silly red herring.

Summer Arctic temperatures blown in from other areas. Strong outflow winds. Jet stream positioning during melt season. Oceanic currents and temperature during melt season. Water vapor. Humidity. Lack of cloud cover. Ozone.

One thing is for sure. If summer melt ever returns to normal and ice build-up remains at the current pace, we should see lots of above average Arctic sea ice year round. It therefor appears reasonable to hypothesize that Arctic sea ice buildup depends not on the winter season, but on the summer season.

A pattern like this leads me to hypothesize that we are talking about a cyclic weather pattern possibly tied to a cyclic oceanic current pattern that is in sync at the moment during the summer.

I have spent study time to look into sea ice behavior. I am waiting for your feedback on what you have studied.

Bruce Cobb (06:12:47) :

a jones (13:22:26) :
All I can say is bravo. Extremely concise, and well-reasoned. I’ve saved a copy of it for inspiration purposes.

****************************

Please allow me to second Bruce Cobb’s praise of your essay.

So Steven Chu is Nobel Prize Laureate; just like Al Gore, and a physicist;

Not at all. Steven Chu has a real Nobel Prize. Gore has one of the pretend prizes that were not established by Alfred Nobel.

In my book that makes Chu much more worthy of my respect, even though I think he is mistaken and simply following the herd on the AGW issue.

If anything, the argument that it would be good to put as much as possible back in circulation bears at least as much validity as any notion that returning a few percent will ruin everything, whereas spending many trillions in current and future lost wealth might ruin all sorts of things, and would probably change nothing for the better. Warm and wet is good, just ask a farmer.

I’m not a professional scientist, I draw pictures, so I am not sure why there isn’t more straight up research and discussion here instead of the anger displayed. From my perspective it makes the folks holding out for more info on climate change look bad.

Well I just make pictures too, but you and I are capable of understanding the issues regardless.

There is plenty of over the top rhetoric on both sides but there is also plenty of discussion on research. The demonization of the opposition in the service of attempting to make hideously expensive changes in the way we live is all one sided, however. And the Natural Climate Change (NCC?) Deniers seem quite keen to continue to ignore very relevant and important data that undermines their position. The threat to our way of life is more immediate, particularly in this political climate, than the highly speculative alarmist claims they are using to try and destroy our ongoing success as a species.

To assuage your concerns. Keep in mind that life began on earth, and flourished, when there was much greater heat and greater CO2 concentrations (and Corals too!) then we have now. It is the captured CO2 in that ancient life that Alarmists claim we must stop returning to the environment. As an exercise in logic, how could it be that even if we restored all the life-sequestered CO2 to the environment (a complete impossibility) — by consuming every bit of coal and oil — we would accomplish anything more than to return the earth to a state where conditions were very very healthy indeed?