What if the Catlin Arctic Ice Survey is for naught?

11 04 2009

Guest post by Steven Goddard

Hell Hath No Fury….
A very hard day.

Catlin team member Ann Daniels had another very difficult day.

Today has been a difficult day of highs and lows, particularly for Ann, whose morning got off to a particularly bad start. In order to power the different technical components of the kit, the team use large batteries, which need to be heated to a certain temperature in order to extract the maximum amount of power. The process of heating batteries involves Ann, sitting by her stoves for several hours, using a specially insulated piece of equipment to capture the steam from boiling water, in order to get the batteries to the correct temperature.
Ann reached her lowest point of the expedition so far, when after tending the boiling pans of water for several hours, she realised she had pre-heated the wrong battery and had accidently picked up the dead battery from the previous day. It was a painful and frustrating realisation at the end of a cold morning.
On the plus side, at the end of the day, Ann felt warm enough to take off her sledging jacket when getting into her sleeping bag for the night. This is the first time in the 41 days of the expedition so far that she has felt warm enough for this luxury. She adds that she was still wearing 3 pairs of trousers, 2 thermal top layers, 2 hats and 4 pairs of gloves, but still, quite a landmark in the expedition so far!

Consider the following scenario.  All goes well and the team arrives home safely some time in the next six weeks.  Now, suppose that the Arctic continues to show recovery this summer, and the realization sinks in that the very premise of the expedition may have been flawed. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Uncategorized

Making Holocene Spaghetti Sauce by Proxy

11 04 2009

Holocene, historic and recent global temperatures from temperature proxies.

Guest post by: Frank Lansner, civil engineer, biotechnology

NOTE: Link to PDF of this article is HERE

In the climate debate, the temperatures of the past are used to determine if the present temperatures are unique and alarming. Any viewpoint can be supported by choosing specific science papers as reference

This paper is one of many attempts to give a realistic overview of the actual messages we get from the temperature proxies.

(“Temperature proxy”: Past temperatures reconstructed from samples using a row of techniques.

The “Spaghetti graphs” in the following gives an impression of the huge variability among the datasets. The essence of each graphic is the major trends. To enable display of multiple data series it was often necessary to interpolate temperature values to the specific years used in graphics.

To avoid most calibration problems, I have set specific years to zero for the different graphs I chose a year where practically all graphs has data, and no further calibration needed. In few cases I have calibrated from 1980-1990-2000 using UAH trend of approx. +0,1K/decade.)

Recent temperature proxies – 120 years

lanser_holocene_figure1

click for a larger image

Fig 1: 10 multi proxies shown for the 20´th century. In addition 14 temperature proxy datasets. The black curve shows average of the 14 datasets as 1 multi proxy. This multi proxy + the 10 of the most used bigger multi-proxy series is the basis for the WHITE graph: “Average of 11 multi proxies”.

The temperature proxies does not show strong net warming since around 1940. In fact, proxy data does not show any warming since 1940. This is no news, it has been recognised for example here: Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Science, climate_change, measurement