Greenland Ice Melt every 150 years is 'right on time'

Sorry, messed up the complaint form link. Here it is. Enjoy.

Yo kadaka ( KD Knoebel ) , when you wash the head of an ass you lose both your time and your soap. You did clean him up as for as this post goes though. And he is still ugly inside. And I see Smokey smoked another one by ripping entropic man . A good deed done there too. These alarmists are used to bulldozeing people with a lot of verbage but when they come on Anthony’s site their stuff turns to garbage thanks to the efforts of the knowledgeable crew that hangs out here !

@ uknowispeaksense on July 24, 2012 at 9:50 pm:
Thank you for supplying an additional demonstration.
Have a nice day.

No mention of the term ‘heat capacity’. Warm air can melt ice. But not much. To melt enough ice to be ‘worrisome’ and raise global sea levels by say just one metre, something like 400,000 cubic kilometres of land borne ice must melt. Work out the heat energy needed which can only be delivered by the atmosphere. The sea does not melt land borne ice directly.

“Maybe she’ll get the headline fixed.” Maybe, maybe not. I saw the story in the Danish on-line news (main story), and immediately went here to get the full truth. The point is that the NASA press release has already done its job, spawning head-line stories around the globe – nobody will check the details. They can change the headline all they want, it doesn’t matter now – minds and hearts have already been captured. The Danish story was accurate, but as is always the case, didn’t contain the full truth. And so it goes.

uknowispeaksense – What questions did you ask – I see only inaccurate comment? Reading your first post I see clear misunderstanding of how this blog works. You see, Anthony simply posted something that somebody else wrote. The 150 year claim was not his, he simply reproduced what Lora Koenig wrote: her research and her maths.Before wasting peoples’ time here, please try to engage brain before touching keyboard.
A brief look at your unsavoury blog seems to suggest that you see rising CO2 as a problem. My question to you is, do you see any link between CO2 concentration and Greenland’s albedo, since you imply that the albedo is related to the melting. If so, perhaps you would explain it and also explain whether it is the CO2 or the albedo that is causing the transient surface melt.
For the record, I am happy to accept that carbon particulates are affecting albedo over all ice-covered areas in the northern hemisphere and may indeed cause problems if not addressed. What I fail to understand is how cutting CO2 levels affects this directly, especially in developed countries where there are widescale and effective measures in place to limit particulate emissions. Much better to channel the vast amounts of money currently spent in cutting CO2 emissions to supporting developing economies in cleaning up their domestic and industrial energy generation and production processes. Now there is a green initiative that I could get behind and would love to see Greenpeace, IPCC etc actively promoting.

The 1889 event was viewed only on a small area. No aircraft, or satellites then to reveal the total surface melt, balloons were available but driven by wind alone.
But given the low coverage 150 years ago, and that our satellite observations started in 1980 we cannot be confident that it is only a 150 year cycle, it could be more frequent and probably is.

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means!” — Inigo Montoya

For maximum effect, the French newspaper “Le Figaro” doesn’t hesitate to go for it:
http://www.lefigaro.fr/environnement/2012/07/25/01029-20120725ARTFIG00343-groenland-sa-calotte-glaciere-a-presque-entierement-fondu.php
“Greenland: The Ice Cap has almost entirely melted!”
“Selon les données de trois satellites analysées par la Nasa et des scientifiques universitaires, environ 97% de la calotte glaciaire avait dégelé à la mi-juillet, a indiqué l’Agence dans un communiqué.
L’expert précise avoir remarqué la disparition de la majorité de la glace du Groenland au 12 juillet en analysant les données d’un premier satellite. Les résultats des deux autres satellites ont confirmé cette découverte. Les cartes satellitaires de la fonte montrent que la calotte glaciaire avait fondu à 40% au 8 juillet et à 97% quatre jours plus tard.”
Incompetence, sensationalism… It must be a candidate for the Friday Laugh.

can’t spell today…must be thinking of fishing

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/25/science/earth/rare-burst-of-melting-seen-in-greenland-ice-sheet.html?hp
This is how the caption on the NYTimes graphic reads: “The extent of Greenland’s ice sheet surface, in white, on July 8, left, and July 12, right, based on measurements from three satellites, which pass over at different times and whose data are combined and analyzed. The deepest pink areas reflect maximal certainty that the ice has melted.” Not exactly internally consistent, and certainly not the same as the caption on the NASA news release, above.

Has anyone actually been on the ground to verify the melting? Interpretation of satellite imagery can sometimes be a little too subjective.

Smokey says:
July 24, 2012 at 5:08 pm
Entropic says:
“For recent climate change there is a demonstrated recent increase in temperature and a demonstrated recent increase in CO2.”
Key word: “recent”. He used it twice, so it must be important.
____________________________________
Of course “Recent” is very important. You can only scare the c^@p out of the ignorant masses if you ignore the past. Since we are talking Greenland this graph is appropriate. As is this peer reviewed paper:

Arctic temperatures falling
The reconstruction shows lower summer temperatures from A.D. 1630 to 1840, a subsequent warming up to the mid-20th century and a cooling trend afterwards. According to our data, a temperature increase is observed during the past decade. The good coherence of multi-decadal to secular trends of our reconstruction and series of observed solar activity indicate that solar activity may have been one major driving factor of past climate on Kola Peninsula.
600 million year graph of global temperatures – various proxies showing we are at near glacial temps.

Or we can go further back in time with this paper.

Temperature and precipitation history of the Arctic
..Solar energy reached a summer maximum (9% higher than at present) ca 11 ka ago and has been decreasing since then, primarily in response to the precession of the equinoxes. The extra energy elevated early Holocene summer temperatures throughout the Arctic 1-3° C above 20th century averages, enough to completely melt many small glaciers throughout the Arctic, although the Greenland Ice Sheet was only slightly smaller than at present… As summer solar energy decreased in the second half of the Holocene, glaciers reestablished or advanced, sea ice expanded, and the flow of warm Atlantic water into the Arctic Ocean diminished. Late Holocene cooling reached its nadir during the Little Ice Age (about 1250-1850 AD), when sun-blocking volcanic eruptions and perhaps other causes added to the orbital cooling, allowing most Arctic glaciers to reach their maximum Holocene extent…”

This paper indicates we are at the point in the earth’s Milankovitch cycle that ushers in an ice age. The biggest question of course is why we are not covered in ice yet.

Lesson from the past: present insolation minimum holds potential for glacial inception (2007)
Because the intensities of the 397 ka BP and present insolation minima are very similar, we conclude that under natural boundary conditions the present insolation minimum holds the potential to terminate the Holocene interglacial. Our findings support the Ruddiman hypothesis [Ruddiman, W., 2003. The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era began thousands of years ago. Climate Change 61, 261–293], which proposes that early anthropogenic greenhouse gas emission prevented the inception of a glacial that would otherwise already have started….”

At least some have taken note that the climate alarmism might be in the wrong direction.

Abrupt Climate Change: Should We Be Worried? – Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Most of the studies and debates on potential climate change, along with its ecological and economic impacts, have focused on the ongoing buildup of industrial greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and a gradual increase in global temperatures. This line of thinking, however, fails to consider another potentially disruptive climate scenario. It ignores recent and rapidly advancing evidence that Earth’s climate repeatedly has shifted abruptly and dramatically in the past, and is capable of doing so in the future.
Fossil evidence clearly demonstrates that Earth vs climate can shift gears within a decade….
But the concept remains little known and scarcely appreciated in the wider community of scientists, economists, policy makers, and world political and business leaders. Thus, world leaders may be planning for climate scenarios of global warming that are opposite to what might actually occur…”

Here is the “climate can shift gears within a decade”
“The onset of the LEAP occurred within less than two decades (see the core photograph in Fig. 4), demonstrating the existence of a sharp threshold, which must be near 416Wm22, which is the 658N July insolation for 118 kyr BP (ref. 9). This value is only slightly below today’s value of 428Wm22. Insolation will remain at this level slightly above the inception for the next 4,000 years before it then increases again.” ~ Sirocko, et al, Vol 436|11 August 2005|doi:10.1038/nature03905. Source
That author is taking it that there is absolutely no variation in solar insolation which is now known to be a false assumption NASA and TSI monitoring by satellite experiments
A couple questions to think about.
If you knew we were headed into glaciation, as one of the movers and shakers in world politics, would you tell everyone? Or would you “adjust” the world’s economy to move industry from the northern latitudes (the EU, USA, Australia, Canada and Russia) down to the southern latitudes (Brazil, India, Mexico, southern China and northern Africa, SE Asia)
Would you “adjust” the world’s economy (wealth redistribution) so as to develop the equatorial belt, and would you buy up large tracts of land in that belt?
Would you “adjust” the world’s politics to shut off the energy, especially for transportation, in the norther countries and herd those people into “compounds” so as to prevent them from using up soon to be scares resources. More importantly would you pick and choose those selected (DNA testing) to live while preventing those selected to parish from having the means to immigrate?
See: link
Do I think a glaciation is going to happen NOW? Of course not, but the movers and shakers of the world are long range planners they think in terms of the continuation of their families and keeping those families firmly in control of world politics. The Rothschild Dynasty is a good example.
I very much doubt that those Movers and Shakers believe in the drivel they are feeding to the general public. I can also see a shift in the attitude towards the industrial development of the USA in the 1970’s when the question of when the next glaciation would start was brought to the attention of the Movers and Shakers.

Philip Bradley says:
July 24, 2012 at 5:41 pm
Correlating CO2 with Arctic sea ice and not Antarctic sea ice is cherry picking, pure and simple.
And as I pointed out in the earlier thread, darker horizontal bands are clearly visible in Arctic icebergs. So they must be in ice cores. Some will be from volcanic eruptions, but I;d be interested to see a systemic study….
____________________________
Philip, How about this:

Study of Dust in Ice Cores Shows Volcanic Eruptions Interfere with the Effect of Sunspots on Global Climate
“The research, published in a paper in the May 15 [2002] issue of Geophysical Research Letters, provides striking evidence that sunspots — blemishes on the sun’s surface indicating strong solar activity — do influence global climate change, but that explosive volcanic eruptions on Earth can completely reverse those influences.
It is the first time that volcanic eruptions have been identified as the atmospheric event responsible for the sudden and baffling reversals that scientists have seen in correlations between sunspots and climate…
“By carefully studying the timing of other volcanic eruptions, we found that they coincided with all of the correlation reversals between sunspots and climate,” said Ram.
A chart in the paper shows how six major volcanic eruptions between 1800 and 1962 occurred during precisely the same years when there were reversals in the correlation between sunspot activity and climate….
According to Donarummo, it long has been known that volcanoes add more dust and more sulfates to the atmosphere.
The UB team discovered that these additional sulfates cause cosmic rays to have a more pronounced effect on Earth by spurring the formation of small droplets in the atmosphere that, in turn, cause the formation of a type of cloud that does not produce rain.
“During these times of high volcanic activity, the sunspot/climate correlation reverses and dust levels rise, even in the absence of high sunspots,” explained Stolz.

Meanwhile we have yet to have a SINGLE summer day here in middle of Norway. The hottest day was in may with 24c and since then it has been shit. We had a few days here and there over 20c, but then next day it is back to 10-12c again.
This might be the first summer at least in my lifetime with not a single day with 25c or higher.
We even had snow in middle of june at sea level and this is after several shitty summers and extreme winters in a row.

Smokey says:
July 24, 2012 at 3:49 pm
“ignoring the fact that it is 15 years with no warming”
This must be the graph you use to reach that conclusion.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.A2.gif
From the graph:-
Date Temp. anomaly Change to 2011
1996 +0.29 0.51 – 0.29 = +0.20
1997 +0.41 0.51 – 0.41 = +0.10
1998 +0.58 0.51 – 0.58 = -0.07
1999 +0.33 0.51 – 0.33 = +0.18
2000 +0.35 0.51 – 0.35 = +0.16
2010 +0.62
2011 0.51
You, sir, have been caught cherrypicking data.
You were most insistant that the measured temperature change for recent years counted from 1998.
It is surely not a coincidence that your chosen year in the latter 1990s is the only one giving a negative temperature change to 2011.
This deliberate obfuscation is exactly the sort of data misuse that I see sceptics complaining about. How do you expect to be taken seriously in debate when you cannot not even meet the standards you would demand of your opponents.

Unprecedented = 150 years average cyclicality
I wonder what the cycles are attributed to ?

@ Ric Werme on July 25, 2012 at 9:56 pm:
Although it’s not “the full temperature record” as HADCRUT3, “variance-adjusted global mean” as was selected, goes back to 1850, not 1860:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/data/hadcrut3vgl
Which I find suspicious as NCDC GHCN only goes back to 1880:
Datasets here near bottom: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cmb-faq/anomalies.php
Select equivalent dataset, The Monthly Global (land and ocean combined into an anomaly) Index (degrees C)
Thus the temperature “data” in HADCRUT3 from 1850 to 1879 seems questionable at best and that range should be avoided without an overriding reason to use it.
Now I’m going to bed now.

Smokey says:
July 25, 2012 at 4:49 pm
Kevin MacDonald,
The Trotsky quote was poking fun, my bad. But you are still cherry-picking

Wrong!
The terms of reference were yours:

Smokey says:
July 24, 2012 at 3:49 pm
The planet has been warming — naturally — since the LIA. The warming trend has not accelerated

Just a reminder:
1. NULL HYPOTHESIS: Statistics the residual hypothesis if the alternative hypothesis tested against it fails to achieve a predetermined significance level.
2.ALTERNATIVE HYPOTHESIS: Statistics the hypothesis that given data do not conform with a given null hypothesis: the null hypothesis is accepted only if its probability exceeds a predetermined significance level.
3. Statistics the theory, methods, and practice of testing a hypothesis concerning the parameters of a population distribution (the null hypothesis) against another (the alternative hypothesis) which will be accepted only if its probability exceeds a predetermined significance level, generally on the basis of statistics derived from random sampling from the given population Compare statistical inference.

Here it seems there is no place for two issues to discuss:
1. The amount of carbon dioxide in the current situation is not alarming. Yes, in future, this value may change for any reason.
2. Some natural events are reversible. This could be due to their oscillatory nature.
The important thing was that in a short time 40% of Greenland ice was melted.
Only the combination of soot and solar radiation could cause such dramatic effects.

[REPLY: Nice try, Entropic, but you are aware that the moderation policies at those other sites are not as, uhhh, liberal and conducive to fair, comprehensive discussion than here at WUWT. That’s why you are here, to argue your case against genuine opposition, which you can’t get at Real Climate. -REP]
Perhaps you should tighten your moderation policy. A lot of the “evidence” presented here would never pass peer review, regardless of which side of the debate it supported.
Could you suggest the best way of compiling data tables in posts here. The word processor collapsed my last table, at July 25th 4.43pm, against the left margin.
[REPLY: Our commenters are quite capable of exposing shonky evidence for what it is and have no compunction doing so. Many are emminently qualified to do so. Exposing bad ideas is as much a service as presenting good ideas. WUWT moderators don’t need to be the arbiters of what is good or bad science.
As for your table problem, I have the same problem. Perhaps one of our commenters can offer a solution. -REP]

As for your table problem, I have the same problem. Perhaps one of our commenters can offer a solution. -REP]
Use the “code” HTML tag, which sets all characters at the same width. Space out entries with underscores as needed instead of multiple spaces as multiple spaces are auto-collapsed into one space. Due to quirks displaying, it works best with start tag on same line as beginning of content, with a return between end of content and close tag. From Entropic Mann comment, replace brackets with left/right arrows:
(start)
[code]Date Temp. anomaly Change to 2011
1996 +0.29 0.51 – 0.29 = +0.20
1997 +0.41 0.51 – 0.41 = +0.10
1998 +0.58 0.51 – 0.58 = -0.07
1999 +0.33 0.51 – 0.33 = +0.18
2000 +0.35 0.51 – 0.35 = +0.16
2010 +0.62
2011 0.51
[/code]
(end)
Result:
(start)
Date Temp. anomaly Change to 2011
1996 +0.29 0.51 – 0.29 = +0.20
1997 +0.41 0.51 – 0.41 = +0.10
1998 +0.58 0.51 – 0.58 = -0.07
1999 +0.33 0.51 – 0.33 = +0.18
2000 +0.35 0.51 – 0.35 = +0.16
2010 +0.62
2011 0.51

(end)
Although I think it should have been:
Year__Anomaly °C__Difference from 2011
1996__+0.29_______+0.22
1997__+0.41_______+0.10
1998__+0.58_______-0.07
1999__+0.33_______+0.18
2000__+0.35_______+0.16
2010__+0.62_______-0.11
2011__+0.51_______+0.00

…or whatever the heck it was he was trying to show.

kadaka (KD Knoebel)
Thank you for the table idea. I’m afraid I gave up programming in the 1980’s when it became obvious that I could be a science teacher or a programmer, but did not have time to be both.
As for my purpose, Smokey claimed that the apparant cooling observed by comparing the global temperatures for 1998 and 2011 showed that global warming had stopped.
My table, before it got squashed, demonstrated that if he had taken any of the two years before or after he would have seen continued warming. Whoever chose 1998 was cherrypicking a date which gave the desired anti-warming result.
Date_ Temp. anomaly_Change to 2011
1996 ____+0.29____ 0.51 – 0.29 = +0.20
1997 ____+0.41____ 0.51 – 0.41 = +0.10
1998 ____+0.58____ 0.51 – 0.58 = -0.07
1999 ____+0.33____ 0.51 – 0.33 = +0.18
2000 ____+0.35____ 0.51 – 0.35 = +0.16
2010 ____+0.62
2011____+0.51
Incidentally, if you end on 2010 instead of 2011, all the changes show warming.
Since you can show the 21st century as warming, cooling or static by picking the combination of dates that suits your desire, this technique is useless as a serious analytical tool. Something more sophisticated, and independant of observer bias, would be needed. Statisticians to the fore, please.

From Entropic man on July 26, 2012 at 3:35 pm:

As for my purpose, Smokey claimed that the apparant cooling observed by comparing the global temperatures for 1998 and 2011 showed that global warming had stopped.

Umm… No. No he didn’t.
From Smokey on July 24, 2012 at 3:49 pm:

(…) First [ignoring the fact that it is 15 years with no warming], (…)

He linked to a graph showing the WoodForTrees Temperature Index from 1997.5 to current end of records. If you would have clicked his link then clicked on “Raw data” you would have seen this:

#WoodForTrees Temperature Index
#Mean of HADCRUT3VGL, GISTEMP, UAH and RSS, offset to UAH/RSS baseline (-0.0975K)
#See http://www.woodfortrees.org/notes for details
…
#Time series (wti) from 1979 to 2012.25

It’s a composite index.
And from that, you’ve dreamed up that Smokey compared the 1998 annual number to 2011’s, and proceeded to “disprove” your imaginary situation by manipulating individual annual figures, during which you claimed Smokey used GISTEMP then drew your “proof” from those numbers.
(And twice now you’ve claimed 0.51-0.29 = 0.20, not 0.22. I corrected that once for my “should be” example. Don’t you check your math?)
So you set up a falsehood, disproved the falsehood, gave that as “proof” Smokey was cherrypicking.
There must be very low standards for evidence against skeptics at ReallyRealClimate if you think “proof” like that is acceptable.

Since you can show the 21st century as warming, cooling or static by picking the combination of dates that suits your desire, this technique is useless as a serious analytical tool. Something more sophisticated, and independant of observer bias, would be needed. Statisticians to the fore, please.

Or… You could simply look at the trends.

The indication from the Greenland ice core of a periodic 115 year interval sharp melting on Greenland, is incredibly interesting. What mechanism can cause this? Does it point to astrophysical or orbital alignments, in which case it opens the possibility of other decadal and century scale climate oscillations being astrophysically forced. This has huge implications for climate science. Or is there some other explanation? How good is the evidence for the 115 year periodicity? Is it by chance over the last few centuries or is it a real phenomenon?

Entropic man says:
July 27, 2012 at 8:02 am
… a decrepit old scientist;
…
Show me a proper peer reviwed statistical analysis giving a better than 50% probability that this null hypotheses is correct. That would do more to convince me than any amount of arm waving.

Decrepit, indeed. Trying the Trenberth Twist, are we? News Flash: the Null is assumed until disproven. There is no onus on anyone, skeptics or other, to “prove” the Null.

kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
July 25, 2012 at 11:58 am
….if you miss a doublequote in the “href=” link, defaults to the page the link is posted on. I’ve noticed you’ve been doing that a lot lately, when your links show up with the “recently viewed” coloration and I check them.
You’re good, you can do better. Please doublecheck before posting. Thank you.
_________________________
We found the internet connection has been dropping “packets” recently so what I write and send are sometimes two different things. But yes I will try double checking more.
I am mentioning this because I am sure we are not the only people with the problem.
(My computer is a real dinosaur and I can not run a word processor and look at the internet at the same time which makes editing a real bear.)

94% of the ice has melted? This statement does not mean that 94% of the ice is gone. No, 94% of the surface is seeing melt.