From the Australian. (h/t to Andrew Bolt)
With weather stations like the ones below, it might be a bit hard to separate the real temperature signal of Antarctica from your local UHI. I wonder how much more cooling would be evident in the data had the weather stations been placed away from the “living pods”?
This picture on a postage stamp from Australia, celebrating the Australian Antarctic Territory in 1997, may help settle the issue. Note the Stevenson Screen near the “living pod” on the right.
Here is the larger photo of the first day of issue card, the Stevenson Screen is also just visible above the snowbank in the lower right. Rather close to human habitation I’d say. Looks like its in the middle of a small AHI (Antarctic Heat Island).
Click for larger image
They have propane heat, apparently:
Here is what Australia’s Mawson Station looked like circa 1956-1957:
And here is what Mawson station looks like today, as of Feb09. It appears they dumped the “living pods”. Maybe a little “urban growth” going on there?
Here’s another picture of a Stevenson Screen close to a building in Antarctica, from the British Antarctic Survey:
![[10004058]](http://www.photo.antarctica.ac.uk/external/guest/image/water/70/10004058)
Location: Fossil Bluff, Alexander Island
Season: 1994/1995
Photographer: Pete Bucktrout
THE Bureau of Meteorology has backed down from a claim that temperatures at Australia’s three bases in Antarctica have been warming over the past three decades.
A senior bureau climatologist had accused The Weekend Australian of manufacturing a report that temperatures were cooling in East Antarctica, where Australia’s Mawson, Davis and Casey bases are located.
The trend of temperatures and ice conditions in Antarctica is central to the debate on global warming because substantial melting of the Antarctic ice cap, which contains 90 per cent of the world’s ice, would be required for sea levels to rise.
While calvings from ice shelves in parts of West Antarctica have generated headlines, evidence has emerged that temperatures are cooling in the east of the continent, which is four times the size of West Antarctica.
Contrary to widespread public perceptions, the area of sea ice around the continent is expanding.
The Weekend Australian reported last month a claim by Bureau of Meteorology senior climatologist Andrew Watkins that monitoring at Australia’s Antarctic bases since the 1950s indicated temperatures were rising. A study was then published by the British Antarctic Survey that concluded the ozone hole was responsible for the cooling and expansion of sea ice around much of the continent.
The head of the study project, John Turner, said at the time that the section of Antarctica that included the Australian bases was among the areas that had cooled.
Dr Watkins said The Weekend Australian had misrepresented the results of the BAS study, which made no findings about temperatures at Australian bases.
When it was pointed out to Dr Watkins that Professor Turner had been quoted directly, Dr Watkins said his bureau, and not the BAS, was the agency collecting temperature data.
“You kept going until you got the answer you wanted,” Dr Watkins said.
“You were told explicitly that the data collected by the Bureau of Metereology at the Australian bases shows a warming for maximum temperatures at all bases, and minimum temperatures at all but Mawson.”
However, Professor Turner told The Weekend Australian the data showed a cooling of the East Antarctica coast associated with the onset of the ozone layer from 1980 onwards. Professor Turner said the monthly mean temperatures for Casey station from 1980 to 2005 showed a cooling of 0.45C per decade. In autumn, the temperature trend has been a cooling of 0.93C per decade.
“These fairly small temperature trends seem to be consistent to me with the small increase in sea ice extent off the coast,” he said.
Dr Watkins did not dispute the figures referred to by Professor Turner.
Referring to the bureau’s data collection since the 1950s, Dr Watkins said Professor Turner’s figures were “only half of the full data set”.
However, Dr Watkins admitted that analysis of the data might show “an ozone-induced cooling trend in the latter half of the record” — a reference to the past three decades.
Dr Watkins declined to release the temperature data to The Weekend Australian. He said it had still to be fully analysed by the bureau.
Nationals Senate leader Barnaby Joyce said he hoped all government agencies would co-operate in helping to inform the global warming debate.
“These agencies need to be able to dispense the facts without fear or bias,” he said.
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So that is all perfectly clear then. When I say warming I really mean cooling, but I cannot say cooling because of political pressure, so warming sounds much better.
I think the last sentence sums this up well:
“These agencies need to be able to dispense the facts without fear or bias,”
H’mmm How much pressure has been applied to all these agencies, and how?
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I thought this quote from Wiki is appropriate. This is from George Orwell’s ‘1984’.
Quote:
The keyword here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four#Doublethink
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Has anyone actually investigated how much these instruments are being affected by their surroundings and the readings adjusted accordingly? Or isn’t it in the BOM’s interest to look too closely?
Still, at least the problem has now been highlighted. One more tack in the AGW coffin?
Talking about pods…
London design show offers pods you can escape in – If you want to get away from global warming, unseasonal flu or the recession, or just need a family-proof space to work at home, designers at a London show have the cocoon for you.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090501/lf_nm_life/us_design_pods
“These agencies need to be able to dispense the facts without fear or bias,” he said.
Apparently they need to dispense the “correct” facts. And if the data won’t tell the truth, you torture, uhm, I mean, adjust, it until it does.
Let me see if if i’ve got this right. They’ve got four monitoring stations. The max is trending up at all four. The min is trending up at three out of four. The mean is trending down at a “fairly small” 0.45C/decade. Exactly how does that work?
Whoops! Don’t know where that four came from, maybe ’cause it’s nearly four in the morning here, but with three and two the point remains the same.
Seems like all the good news is coming out of Australia and ‘The Australian’ lately. Go you good thing!
Regards
Michael
“Turner said the monthly mean temperatures for Casey station from 1980 to 2005 showed a cooling of 0.45C per decade. In autumn, the temperature trend has been a cooling of 0.93C per decade.
“These fairly small temperature trends seem to be consistent to me with the small increase in sea ice extent off the coast,” he said.”
———————————————–
lessons learned
lesson 1:
+2C/century is catastrophic.
-4.5C/century and -9.3C/century are fairly small temperature trends.
lesson 2:
the ozone hole during antarctic spring (september) is responsible for low temperature anomalies in autumn.
It would appear that the Australian is getting under the skins of both politicians and scientists on Global Warming
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25406747-30417,00.html
Having lived in Oz I expect some tall-poppies at BOM and in cabinet will be facing the chop.
Still a bit chilly in Australia.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25416630-30417,00.html
The Australian “Bureau of Meteorology” appears to be another red hot bed of warming alarmism.
About a year ago BOM personnel led by a senior BOM person, Dr David Jones, gave a presentation on global warming at a Farm Expo in western Victoria.
Mann’s thoroughly discredited hockey stick was the most prominently displayed exhibit during the whole of the presentation although no direct reference was made to it in the spoken presentation.
When challenged that the evidence for global warming was in serious doubt due to the lack of any evidence of stratospheric warming as predicted by the models and the then evident small cooling trend derived from the ARGO float array in the world’s oceans, David Jones reply was a short categorical “that’s nonsense !” repeated two or three times if I remember correctly.
No further enlightenment was entered into or any explanation as to why it was “nonsense”.
He was after all, the” Expert” whose knowledge and skills were never to be allowed to be challenged by a mere uneducated farmer asking a few awkward questions.
Having said that, I have had the pleasure of meeting a number of very decent and completely accessible BOM guys and gals and climate researchers in both the BOM and the climate research section of the CSIRO, Australia’s main research organisation,
At this EXPO, we also had a presentation explaining the operation of Australia’s proposed “Emissions Trading Scheme” by a commercial company that was going into trading carbon credits when the ETS is passed into law. [ now becoming very doubtful and becoming increasingly so as both the public and the pollies wake up to the rather nasty potential economic and social consequences ]
At the end of the presentation on the proposed ETS, there was complete bafflement amongst the audience as to just what was involved and how the bloody thing was supposed to work.
When the question was asked of the carbon trader, we know that there is a lot of money in it for you, now what is in it for us, the farmers?
Much looking at the floor and a great deal of foot shuffling and no answer.
Question time was promptly shut down.
Why cannot BOM release the raw data as it is collected and continue to analyze it?
Are there no qualified academics in Australia or scientists in other branches of government who can do the job of analysis?
Sounds like BOM has a monopoly over this data that is not in the public interest.
I’m sure a full analysis will reveal the warming signal
A couple of people asked recently if there is an alternative source of weather forecasts for the UK. You can get much more detailed forecasts here, including forecasts out to 16 days:
http://www.netweather.tv
They have just published their long range forecast for the summer which (no surprise) differs from the Met Office. They say May and June warmer than average but July and August colder and wetter. I don’t know who they are but I rate them highly. They were a LOT better at forecasting last winter than the Met Office.
and the hits keep on coming
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/opinion/news/article.cfm?c_id=466&objectid=10569629&pnum=0
Maybe things will better once the BoM gets their $30mil supercomputer…
http://anhonestclimatedebate.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/30-million-supercomputer-announced-for-bureau-of-meteorology
a bit OT but i like the analysis on CO2
Now we have what we need. It takes ~14,138mmt of CO2 emissions to raise the atmospheric CO2 concentration by ~1 ppm and it takes ~125 ppm to raise the global temperature ~1ºC. So multiplying ~14,138mmt/pmm by ~125ppm/ºC gives us ~1,767,250mmt/ºC.
That’s our magic number—1,767,250.
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2009/04/30/what-you-cant-do-about-global-warming/#more-376
So when its cooling its due to the hole in the ozone layer which is also our fault, we cant win if it warms or cools!
Once they have adjusted the data for “ozone cooling” I am sure they will release it, maybe Mann could do it for them?
Our Australian BoM spokesman Watkins says the Australian research region of Antarctica has warmed since the 1950s. This would not be surprising since most of Antarctica warmed from the 1950s – but only to the 1970s (World Climate Report 30th January 2009: Antarctica Again). So it also would not be surprising if our Antarctic research region likewise did not warm in recent decades, in line with the reports by the British team and the Australian newspaper.
The British team claim that the lack of recent Antarctic warming is due to the hole in the ozone layer. It is supposed to produce cold winds that descend to the surface, swamping AGW and causing the increase in sea ice observed around Antarctica. Steven Goddard on this blog has objected that the ozone hole opens in spring, the wrong season for ice growth; but the theory claims that the cold winds take a substantial time to reach ground level. However, the British workers strangely claim that the surface winds are at a maximum in the autumn, yet the ice is at a minimum in this same season, autumn. (See British Antarctic Survey Press Release 05/2009)
There has been much media attention to the recent loss of ice from the Wilkins ice shelf of Antarctica. But this is part of the Antarctic Peninsula, a small section of the continent, projecting far out from the main body of Antarctica. The peninsula has evidently warmed markedly, at about 5 times the global average. But it may be uniquely exposed to natural current variations, due to its atypical location, as suggested by Duncan Wingham.
A simple check of the GISS records for stations in Antarctica show the overwhelming majority of stations show no rise in temps for the last 50 years.
Amazing how most of the world’s press ignore this.
One other topic which is hot at the moment here in Australia, and particularly in The Australian Newspaper (linked a couple of times above) is Ian Plimer’s book Heaven and Earth. I received my copy yesterday, a well argued geologist’s long term view of climate change.
To quote from the publishers website (http://www.connorcourt.com) that came with it, which pretty much sums up AGW –
“A new ignorance fills the yawning spiritual gap in Western society. Climate change politics is religious fundamentalism masquerading as science. Its triumph is computer models unrelated to observations in nature. There has been no critical due diligence of the science of climate change, dogma dominates, sceptics are pilloried and 17th Century thinking promotes prophets of doom, guilt and penance.”
You can order a copy from their website.
Quote:
“Dr Watkins declined to release the temperature data to The Weekend Australian. He said it had still to be fully analysed by the bureau.”
Which is code for, time is needed to make the temps look how we want them to look.
All that damn inconvenient data; refuses to perform as required by the models. And the poor AGW proponents are liable to strain something (like the truth) when they try to explain the data’s odd behavior. Now that they’ve been caught they’ll probably start a hunt for data supporting the warming; first, though, they may want to take a creative writing course.
Somewhat OT, but I offer a response to the sub discussion concerning Jet Stream data in the “May Day” post. (Wilde and Grey). An unclass US Navy Met site depicts NH and SH Jet wind flows here; http://www.usno.navy.mil/FNMOC/meteorology-products-1. Go to: WXMAP, Prediction Charts, Global, either GFS or NGP (bottom of page).
I would like to see this data reduced to a linear plot for spectrum analysis. Unfortunately my expertise and tool kit are not up to the task. I suspect that an abundance of talent exists out there in the Distributed Intelligence of the WUWT community. Suggestions Appreciated. Email on file.
When you can’t really tell if its warming or cooling and the number you get is either positive or negative depending on the date you start from or what correction algorithm you apply to the satellite measurements, then the logical conclusion is that there is no real trend.
Even a climate researcher should be able to admit that.
Mumbling under your breath and stuttering out an answer that sounds like “umm, … well, …. well … the Earth has clearly been warming … umm … if you start measuring in 1975 and end in 1998 … and those these trends have been affected by ozone starting in 1980 and … and then there were aerosols from 1960 to 1975 … if we don’t stop pollution now, the Antarctic will melt … ice sheets … sea level swamp cities … drought … floods … hurricanes … warmer in some locations, cooler in others, … it could happen within a few years … I know I said that 20 years ago but the newest models are much more accurate … “,
That is normally the kind of thing that one should start ignoring after awhile until some better proof is presented.