More on the National Geographic Decline

Just anecodottal photograph data from the Lion Inn, N. Yorkshire, last weekend after peat coring. The photographs of snow accumulation are massive, in the order of 4 metres (v. high for the north of England uplands, highest on record for the 20th Cent. I would guess). This fits well with the dark-blue, unsmoothed old National Geographic data as opposed to the further adjusted (!) GISS.
Bruce M. Albert, Durham U.

That would be 1963 (above).

It would seem that MWP was not the only problem playing on the minds of the current crop of climate scientists(?).
Successive adjustments to the raw data has practically eliminated the global cooling of the 50s, 60s and 70s, which instigated the New Ice Age scare of the last century, in order to present the current case for unprecedented warming of the Global Warming scare.
We may now have an explanation for the ‘divergence’ problem.
Maybe trees are good thermometers after all. Maybe the warming of the 1930s and 40s is similar today. Maybe climate scientists were unbelieving of the story the actual data was telling, and simply adjusted and cherry-picked the data to suit the AGW hypothesis.
It would appear that scare stories of an impending Ice Age and runaway Global Warming were just that, scare stories.
It would seem that the current crop of scientists have fallen into the trap of employing cargo cult science – they had to fool themselves first before they could fool others.
This is another BLACK DAY for science.

Willis: To confirm, the “Folland adjustment” would show up as the difference between the COADS SST data and the HADISST data for the Northern Hemisphere. It does explain part of the difference between the GISS and the National Geographic curves prior to 1941.
http://i39.tinypic.com/16jga37.png
Any later SST adjustments do not explain the difference after 1941.

Willis,
Sorry about this, but you must have been expecting me to appear, teeth shining, frothing at the mouth, hands waving furiously and with eyes going round faster than a recycled carbon credit.
The fudged (I would not dignify what’s going on here with the appellation ‘correction’) figures for the 1935 to 1965 SSTs go right to the heart of the problems with climate science. The UEA emails give us this (snipped for brevity, but it’s very easy to find via Google):
quote
From: Tom Wigley
To: Phil Jones
Subject: 1940s
Date: Sun, 27 Sep 2009 23:25:38 -0600
Cc: Ben Santer
Here are some speculations on correcting SSTs to partly
explain the 1940s warming blip.
[snip]
It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip,
but we are still left with “why the blip”.
unquote
Why the blip indeed? This is where science advances, by noticing discrepancies which do not fit the perceived picture: the precession of Mercury; the strange coincidence of fossils across oceans; the failure of a heavy cannon ball to fall much faster than a smaller one. A scientist should greet a discrepancy with cries of joy, something to use to make a name! But no, climate science adjusts it away. Is it just me or is there a touch of wistfulness about that ‘why the blip’, some tiny inward proper scientist who would love to chase truth rather than the consensus?
On one of the Climate Audit threads you reference, I made the following points:
quote
While it is nice to see a refutation of the bucket correction, it is surprising that there is no attempt to calibrate SSTs against exposed coastal weather stations. The failure of Folland and Parker to match e.g. Valentia’s record is obvious. There must be a chain of such stations, able to indicate trends if not actual temperatures — the Azores, Canaries, Bermuda etc in the Atlantic for example. The trends should be good enough to demonstrate the error in the assumptions behind the correction. Where the calibrating stations are airfields, there should be good cloud data as well — aircrew are rather keen on knowing about low cloud over their runway.
However, removing F&P not only removes the unexplained fall in temperatures from ‘41 onwards, it generates a large hump starting in 1939 (see graphs of bucket correction in this blog). Then we have the problem of explaining that hump. What do the statistics say about an excursion of .5 deg above the steady trend line from 1910 to present? That’s a remarkable el Nino.
unquote.
That blip niggled me. It stood out clearly on the Hadcrut graphs, even though their scale had been chosen to make it look insignificant by pushing its peak near the zero line. Then the graphs changed, the warming, initially sharp in 1939/40, smeared out to become a gradual rise from 1935 onwards and, because the same rise was extended in time, it looked much less dramatic, much less in need of explanation. Fudge, it was obviously being fudged — I didn’t know about the arbitrary adjustments that could be made, not being privy to the above email, but it looked very odd. Why hide the blip? Because they could not explain it.
There are other problems with climate science: why does the isotope signal for human CO2 emissions start in 1750? Why does warming in the period from 1910 to 1940 match that from 1975 to 2005? (Yes, ish, eyeball stuff, but Tamino kindly calculated the CO2 forcing for the two periods, 0.25 w/m^2 and 2 w/m^2, more-or-less the same warming but eight times the forcing. Apparently I was using the wrong data or something and it’s not a problem, move along) The consensus theory is very simplistic, CO2 in, warming out. But what about biology? What else are we doing to the planet that might have world-wide effects from a small input?
The FAO have somewhere on the web a graph of surface wind speed over the oceans — they have an effect on ocean fertility — and the 1939/45 period stands out clearly, with the biggest effect, about seven metres/sec increase, occurring in the Atlantic. What slows the wind over the ocean? Engagement with the surface. What could reduce that? Smoothed surfaces, surfaces which fail to ruffle when blown upon, surfaces polluted with oil. I checked the history books — yes, there were several documented large oil spills in the Atlantic during that period. And the Pacific too. Older readers might have read about it or even fought in it.
So was born The Kriegesmarine Hypothesis: massive oil spills polluted the surface and smoothed whole oceans. Smooth water has a lower albedo than rough, polluted water will evaporate less, so the surface will warm. Smoothed waves break less often and produce many fewer salt water droplets, fewer droplets, fewer cloud condensation nuclei (CCNs) so — bingo! — fewer low level clouds. Fewer clouds, less warming. Smoother water, fewer bubbles driven down into the depths, less absorption, less CO2 pull down. Less CO2 in the water, fewer plankton, less export of CO2 to the deep ocean via dead plankton. Plankton in fertile waters preferentially use C12, so fewer plankton means less pull down of C12 from the air: C12 signal goes up and CO2 amount goes up.
The disengagement of wind from the surface and the warming of the surface reduce upwelling which means the surface waters become depleted of nutrients. Many starvation-tolerant species of plankton use C4 metabolism which discriminates less against C13: their bodies drift down carrying a higher amount of C13 compared with their C3 cousins, the pull down of C13 increases leaving more C12 in the atmosphere. Ruffled water has a higher emissivity than smooth, so that explained the preferential warming of the Arctic: during darkness it was cooling slower that the historical rate and the effect would be enhanced by the slow breakdown of oil in the icy waters.
It was a game, a game of seeing how many effects one could plausibly attribute to oil spill. I was pleased with the result: everything except the population crash of cod on the Grand Banks by the look of it.
So, that explained the blip. AGW was still real, no problem there, because wartime oil spills stopped in 1946. Not entirely, of course, leaking wrecks would have been bubbling up oil for years and the post war industrial boom would be pushing gallons of waste oil down the sewers. So I checked on that. Enough oil comes down the sewers onto the ocean to coat the entire surface every two weeks. (I did the calculations using the observations made by Benjamin Franklin on a Clapham Common pond: all science is one.) Then I read about Tide, the first synthetic detergent. Contrary to expectations, surfactants smooth water and have the same effects as oil. The new detergents are also resistant to bio-breakdown. It was worse than I thought. Maybe AGW was real after all, and caused by Big Oil and Big Surfactant, but it was nothing to do with CO2 at all. CO2 is a feedback, not a forcing.
Here I got a bit carried away. The joke had lost its savour — wouldn’t it be terrible if I was right? I emailed a couple of big names and got very nice replies, reassuring me that the Kriegesmarine Effect was too small to make a difference. (As an aside, isn’t it strange how the AGW proponents are so rude and those on the sceptic side (ie the real scientists) are polite and tolerant of even the oddest questions? Anyway…) That was reassuring until I read Latham and Salter’s paper about their cloud ships. Tiny amounts of seawater could be broken down into droplets and pumped out to make CCNs, amounts that would be dwarfed by the changes that surface pollution could cause. If the cloud ships work then so does the Kriegesmarine Effect.
Biology controls its environment. Plankton emit di-methyl sulphide to make CCNs. Has the oil/surfactant pollution damaged this system? I find that diatoms release little DMS and there are hints that the C4 types are not so good at it, but that’s a tentative suggestion. When an ice-floe melts it ruins the lives of all the stuff growing underneath. Do they try to release cloud makers to keep the sun off? Has the amount of dissolved silica from farming run-off changed the plankton populations, replacing calciferous types with diatoms which are less reflective and less C12 discriminatory? Have we disrupted the atmospheric boundary layer, that couple of thousand feet above the ocean surface as well as the oceanic boundary layer, that few microns of oil and biology, surfactant and debris where air and water meet? Do we understand the physics of an oil or surfactant contaminated cloud droplets? Why are radiolarian skeletons becoming more fragile? Have we reduced the numbers of Ameliania huxleyi enough to change the ocean’s albedo? What do eel fry feed on? So many blips, so much more to find — the answer to the problems of climate change is research, massive amounts of it.
Can I defend the above speculation? Not really, not with any rigor because I don’t think the answers are out there. Cleaning up the sewers wouldn’t be a bad thing to do anyway, so it’s worth doing that. If it cools things then it would be a bonus. It really needs to be taken seriously: I’ve sat on a hillside in Tenerife and seen the Atlantic smoothed in a broad swathe as far as the eye could see by the sewage run-off from one tiny town. “Action on climate is justified, not because the science is certain, but precisely because it is not” The Economist. They’ll obviously be backing a response to the Kriegesmarine Effect.
Less fog in San Francisco? Fewer CCNs, not ocean warming. Why the blip? Spilled oil. The cod? Diatoms are silica limited but very efficient competitors. They are being fed more silica from NA agriculture run-off and are suppressing the phytoplankton on which the fry feed.
Now that’s what I call an hypothesis!
Julian Flood
My eyes and my wrists ache….

What did it happend in 1941?

Ref – Bill Illis (05:57:19) :
“Here is a chart Phil Jones presented at a conference at NCAR last summer…”
___________________
Looks like Brohan et al is the problem. I’d give him an “F” and send a note home to his mother that he just sits in class drawing dashed line pictures and looking out the window.
But it dows look like he’s found his nitch, doesn’t it?

Enneagram (05:42:58) : You asked, “What did it happend in 1941?”
There was a change in the way they measured sea surface temperatures. The following is a quote from Folland and Parker (1994), CORRECTION OF INSTRUMENTAL BIASES IN HISTORICAL SEA SURFACE TEMPERATURE DATA.
ftp://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/pub/sea_surface_temperature/buoy/gostaplus/hdf/Document/papers/1-crrt/1-CRRT.HTM
“The methods were thought to have changed from the predominant use of canvas and other uninsulated buckets to the use of engine intakes.”

November 1976 National Geographic article
The article which must not be mentioned.

Tony:
“The very many excellent articles that are written do tend to be a five minute wonder as another one quickly comes along to take its place. Do you know of anywhere on the web where articles on say sea ice levels, or Co2 concentrations, or other specific topics, are logically grouped together so they can be easily read in one place without getting into all sorts of side issues?
—…—…
I contribute to http://www.co2science.org regularly.
They have an excellent grouping – by topic – of several hundred related science papers: Unlike WattsUp, the format is to present a new web page weekly, each web page highlighting four to eight papers and an abstract (and criticism, if needed) of each paper.
Regular topics are CO2 levels and their improvement in plant life, temperature itself, and sea ice. Their index is very good, but large.
Robert