New study using satellite data: Alaskan glacier melt overestimated

7 02 2010

From a press release provided by Centre national de la recherche scientifique in Paris, France:

Improved estimate of glacier decline in Alaska.

From the CNRS photo library, provided with the press release: Field campaign on the Saint Elias glaciers (Alaska and Yukon Territory) © M. J. Hambrey (Aberystwyth University)

Glaciologists at the Laboratory for Space Studies in Geophysics and Oceanography (LEGOS – CNRS/CNES/IRD/Université Toulouse 3) and their US and Canadian colleagues (1) have shown that previous studies have largely overestimated mass loss from Alaskan glaciers over the past 40 years. Recent data from the SPOT 5 and ASTER satellites have enabled researchers to extensively map mass loss in these glaciers, which contributed 0.12 mm/year to sea-level rise between 1962 and 2006, rather than 0.17 mm/year as previously estimated.

Mountain glaciers cover between 500 000 and 600 000 km2 of the Earth’s surface (around the size of France), which is little compared to the area of the Greenland (1.6 million km2) and Antarctic (12.3 million km2) ice sheets. Despite their small size, mountain glaciers have played a major role in recent sea-level rise due to their rapid melting in response to global climate warming. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 66 Comments »

Categories : Science, glaciers, sea level

Flashback to 2007 – SST to plunge again?

5 02 2010

Steve Goddard points out that warm SST events often have a downside. My view: something like capacitor discharge in an RC circuit. – Anthony

http://www.amusementtoday.com/2009_new_site/image/May2009/Plunge03.jpg

Pilgrims Plunge - photo from Amusement Today - click for details

Dr. Roy Spencer reported that January, 2010 was the warmest on record at +0.72C anomaly after a relatively cool +0.28 in December.  Dr. Spencer is one of the most trustworthy players in climate science and clearly does not have a warming agenda. So is earth’s climate warming out of control after all?

To answer this question, it is worth looking back at the “second warmest January” which came in 2007. Like 2010, January, 2007 also took a big jump up from the previous month and was at the peak of an El Nino.  The warm weather led the Met Office and to forecast a record warm year.  Hansen also speculated about the possibility of a “Super El Nino.” Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 165 Comments »

Categories : Sea Surface Temperature

More on Ocean Heat Content and recent revisions to the data

5 02 2010
OHC Linear Trends and Recent Update of NODC OHC (0-700 Meters) Data

Guest post by Bob Tisdale

[This is a follow up post to the first one on WUWT where Bob first examined the recent OHC revision, seen below  - Anthony]


http://i48.tinypic.com/14e6wjn.gif

The National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC) presented its Ocean Heat Content (OHC) data in conjunction with the Levitus et al (2009) Paper. The NODC makes the data available to the public and maintains it at their GLOBAL OCEAN HEAT CONTENT webpage. About January 20, 2010, the NODC added its 4th quarter and annual 2009 OHC data so that it covered the period of 1955 to 2009. On January 29 and February 1, 2010, the NODC also updated its 2006-and-later data. The KNMI Climate Explorer was updated in response to the 4th quarter NODC OHC additions and, on February 1, to the 2006-and-later revisions. (Thanks to Tim and Geert Jan for the timely updates.)

This post presents:
1. A brief look at impact of the revisions (corrections) to the 2006-and-later OHC data
2. OHC Trend Comparisons for individual ocean basins and hemispheres
3. An update of the global, hemispheric, and basin OHC data through December 2009

A Note About The Data Presented In This Post: This data used in the graphs (except Figure 2) was downloaded through the KNMI Climate Explorer website, which allows users to define the coordinates of the desired data subset. The data is presented in Gigajoules per square meter (GJ/m^2), not in 10^22 Joules like the NODC. In the GJ/m^2 format, subsets are easier to compare, since adjustments for surface area do not have to be made (they’ve already been made). The NODC presents quarterly data. KNMI includes those quarterly values for each corresponding month. This “squares off” the monthly data in the graphs, since the one value is the same for three consecutive months, but it permits comparisons to other monthly datasets, such as NINO3.4 SST anomalies.

REVISIONS (Corrections) TO THE 2006-AND-LATER NODC OHC DATA Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 47 Comments »

Categories : oceans

NASA Still Spreading Antarctic Worries

3 02 2010

Steven Goddard looks at trends in Antarctica and compares to NASA’s recent article.

File:Kaiserpinguine mit Jungen.jpg

Antarctica - Emperor Penguins - Image: Wikimedia Commons

A January 12, 2010 Earth Observatory article warns that Antarctica

“has been losing more than a hundred cubic kilometers (24 cubic miles) of ice each year since 2002” and that “if all of this ice melted, it would raise global sea level by about 60 meter (197 feet).“

If sea level rose 60 meters, that would wipe out most of the world’s population – which would no doubt make some environmentalists happy.  Sadly for them though, Antarctica contains 30 × 10^6 km3 of ice which means that it will take 300,000 years for all the ice to melt at NASA’s claimed current rate of 100 km3 per year.  (Chances are that we will run out of fossil fuels long before then.)  The surface area of Antarctica is 14.2 million km2 which would indicate an average melt of less than 7 millimeters per year across the continent.  (Is NASA claiming that they can measure changes in Antarctic ice thickness within 7 millimeters?)  But even more problematic is that UAH satellite data shows no increase in temperatures in Antarctica, rather a small decline. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 228 Comments »

Categories : Antarctic

Diverging views

29 01 2010

The GISS Temperature Record Divergence Problem

Guest post by Tilo Reber

In connection with James Hansen’s explanation of why his GISS temperature record diverges from that of HadCRUT, I decided to check on the legitimacy of what GISS was doing. Dr. Hansen’s article is here at RealClimate. This is the specific chart of interest:
(click on chart to expand)
In this chart, Dr. Hansen explains how the GISS record is different from HadCRUT.   The essential difference is that there are areas at the poles where GISS has filled in the values by extrapolating from the nearest land based records.   Dr. Hansen created a mask of all the areas that HadCRUT does not cover.  He then applies this mask to the GISS record and deletes the readings for the areas that are masked off.  The resulting chart is marked GISS/HadCRUT mask above.   Dr. Hansen then goes on to provide a graph which shows that the GISS divergence with HadCRUT no longer exists after the missing HadCRUT boxes have been removed from the GISS record. Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 150 Comments »

Categories : Antarctic, Arctic, climate data

New paper in Nature on CO2 amplification: “it’s less than we thought”

28 01 2010

Amplification of Global Warming by Carbon-Cycle Feedback Significantly Less Than Thought, Study Suggests

http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003400/a003440/airsCO2_printres.0392_web.png

This image shows the global monthly average Carbon Dioxide in July 2003 as seen by Aqua/AIRS.

from ScienceDaily (Jan. 28, 2010) — A new estimate of the feedback between temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration has been derived from a comprehensive comparison of temperature and CO2 records spanning the past millennium.

The result, which is based on more than 200,000 individual comparisons, implies that the amplification of current global warming by carbon-cycle feedback will be significantly less than recent work has suggested.

Climate warming causes many changes in the global carbon cycle, with the net effect generally considered to be an increase in atmospheric CO2 with increasing temperature — in other words, a positive feedback between temperature and CO2. Uncertainty in the magnitude of this feedback has led to a wide range in projections of current global warming: about 40% of the uncertainty in these projections comes from this source. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 200 Comments »

Categories : Carbon dioxide

American Thinker on CRU, GISS, and Climategate

22 01 2010

Climategate: CRU Was But the Tip of the Iceberg

By Marc Sheppard

Not surprisingly, the blatant corruption exposed at Britain’s premiere climate institute was not contained within the nation’s borders. Just months after the Climategate scandal broke, a new study has uncovered compelling evidence that our government’s principal climate centers have also been manipulating worldwide temperature data in order to fraudulently advance the global warming political agenda.

Not only does the preliminary report [PDF] indict a broader network of conspirators, but it also challenges the very mechanism by which global temperatures are measured, published, and historically ranked.

Last Thursday, Certified Consulting Meteorologist Joseph D’Aleo and computer expert E. Michael Smith appeared together on KUSI TV [Video] to discuss the Climategate — American Style scandal they had discovered. This time out, the alleged perpetrators are the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).

NOAA stands accused by the two researchers of strategically deleting cherry-picked, cooler-reporting weather observation stations from the temperature data it provides the world through its National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). D’Aleo explained to show host and Weather Channel founder John Coleman that while the Hadley Center in the U.K. has been the subject of recent scrutiny, “[w]e think NOAA is complicit, if not the real ground zero for the issue.”

And their primary accomplices are the scientists at GISS, who put the altered data through an even more biased regimen of alterations, including intentionally replacing the dropped NOAA readings with those of stations located in much warmer locales.

As you’ll soon see, the ultimate effects of these statistical transgressions on the reports which influence climate alarm and subsequently world energy policy are nothing short of staggering. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 156 Comments »

Categories : Climategate, climate data

Warmest decade on record*

22 01 2010

From NASA’s press release

NASA Research Finds Last Decade was Warmest on Record, 2009 One of Warmest Years

From NASA GISTEMP- Click image for original source

WASHINGTON — A new analysis of global surface temperatures by NASA scientists finds the past year was tied for the second warmest since 1880. In the Southern Hemisphere, 2009 was the warmest year on record.

Although 2008 was the coolest year of the decade because of a strong La Nina that cooled the tropical Pacific Ocean, 2009 saw a return to a near-record global temperatures as the La Nina diminished, according to the new analysis by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York. The past year was a small fraction of a degree cooler than 2005, the warmest on record, putting 2009 in a virtual tie with a cluster of other years –1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, and 2007 — for the second warmest on record. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 221 Comments »

Categories : climate data

What Does it Take to Be a Science Expert?

19 01 2010

Source : Daily Mail

Parents, please encourage your children to become “science experts.”  The perks are excellent – prestige, travel, publicity, conferences – your fifteen minutes of fame.  And all you have to do is make bigger claims than the last expert.

Here are a few favorite gems :

March 10, 2006: It’s official: Solar minimum has arrived. Sunspots have all but vanished. Solar flares are nonexistent. The sun is utterly quiet.
This week researchers announced that a storm is coming–the most intense solar maximum in fifty years. The prediction comes from a team led by Mausumi Dikpati of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). “The next sunspot cycle will be 30% to 50% stronger than the previous one,” she says. If correct, the years ahead could produce a burst of solar activity second only to the historic Solar Max of 1958.
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/10mar_stormwarning.htm

Dec. 21, 2006: Evidence is mounting: the next solar cycle is going to be a big one.
see captionSolar cycle 24, due to peak in 2010 or 2011 “looks like its going to be one of the most intense cycles since record-keeping began almost 400 years ago,” says solar physicist David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center. He and colleague Robert Wilson presented this conclusion last week at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/21dec_cycle24.htm
Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 159 Comments »

Categories : Science, satire

Glaciers in Wales?

17 01 2010

http://myweb.facstaff.wwu.edu/talbot/RGW/1-INTRO_files/IntroFig04.jpg

UK Glaciations – Source: Western Washington University

Just prior to Copenhagen, there was a flurry of news stories about Greenland melt accelerating and sea level rising up to seven meters, like this one from Spiegel. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 86 Comments »

Categories : glaciers, sea level

Forecasting The Arctic Oscillation

15 01 2010

Recently the Chief of the met office went on UK TV to say:

“OUR SHORT TERM FORECASTS ARE AMONG THE BEST IN THE WORLD.” (see video here)

Yesterday, the UK Met Office had to make a rare mea culpa, saying they had botched their own recent snow forecast, it is useful to point out that they aren’t the only one with egg on their faces.

http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/met_office_forecast_computer-520.jpg?w=260&h=260

In early October, the Arctic Oscillation (AO) took an unexpected dip into deeply negative territory, which led to the sixth snowiest October on record in the Northern Hemisphere and the snowiest on record in the US.  If you look at the 14 day forecast at the bottom of the graph below, you can see that the dip caught NOAA forecasters off guard. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 177 Comments »

Categories : forecasting, modeling, snowfall, weather

NWS Met on Florida Cold: “This is the longest stretch ever in 100 years of record keeping.”

15 01 2010

From the “weather is not climate department” and  the High Springs Florida Herald, a story of record length of subfreezing cold in Florida.

Photo By Ronald Dupont Jr. Frozen bird baths and trees glistening with icicles (such as this scene at a home behind the First Baptist Church of High Springs) were common throughout the Crescent Communities as the area saw a record number of days where the temperatures fell below freezing.

Excerpts:

Assessing the full damage to many crops will not be known for several weeks.

Branford/Fort White area fish farmer Dave Walen farms native fish that will not die as a result of the cold, but his business is still being affected by the cold.

That’s because the fish have settled deep in the lime rock pit he uses to farm the fish, and he cannot reach them. He doesn’t know when they will decide to swim close enough to the surface to catch.

“We have orders for fish that we can’t fulfill – orders since before Christmas,” Walen said. “The cold stops everything.”

As of Wednesday, Jan. 13, the area has experienced 12 consecutive days of below freezing temperatures — a new record.

National Weather Service Meteorologist Jason Hess said that it’s the length of the cold that is most significant.

“This is the longest stretch ever in 100 years of record keeping.”

A new daily record low temperature was set Sunday, Jan. 11, in the Crescent Communities, with the area reaching 17 degrees.

Since the beginning of January, temperatures have remained more than 20 degrees below normal. Temperatures normally should be up in the 60s during the day and the 40s at night, Hess said.

Recently, the highs have been in the 40s and the lows in the 20s.

Full story here

The NWS Public Information Statement from WSFO Jacksonville: Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 73 Comments »

Categories : records, weather

Antarctic sea water shows ‘no sign’ of warming

11 01 2010

From the Australian: SEA water under an East Antarctic ice shelf showed no sign of higher temperatures despite fears of a thaw linked to global warming that could bring higher world ocean levels, first tests showed yesterday.

The drilling rig that was used - ironically it uses hot water to drill! Keith Makinson and Keith Nicholls from British Antarctic Survey hot water drilling the Filchner Ronne Ice-Shelf in a previous expedition.

Sensors lowered through three holes drilled in the Fimbul Ice Shelf showed the sea water is still around freezing and not at higher temperatures widely blamed for the break-up of 10 shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula, the most northerly part of the frozen continent in West Antarctica.

Click for larger map

“The water under the ice shelf is very close to the freezing point,” Ole Anders Noest of the Norwegian Polar Institute wrote after drilling through the Fimbul, which is between 250m and 400m thick.

“This situation seems to be stable, suggesting that the melting under the ice shelf does not increase,” he wrote of the first drilling cores. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 75 Comments »

Categories : Antarctic, Science, sea ice

Modeling to the 2nd degree: back to the future

11 01 2010

More gloomy outlook worries from this NCAR press release: Climate conditions in 2050 crucial to avoid harmful impacts in 2100

Scientists are unraveling a chain of events that led to large-scale warmings and coolings across the Northern Hemisphere during past ice ages. As ice sheets expanded, water levels dropped in the narrow Bering Strait (left) and cut off the flow of relatively fresh water from the northern Pacific through the Arctic into the saltier Atlantic. This altered ocean currents, increasing the flow of Atlantic water northward from the tropics and producing warming in the north Atlantic (right, shown in dark red) that melted ice sheets and affected climate patterns and sea levels across much of the world.

BOULDER–While governments around the world continue to explore strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, a new study suggests policymakers should focus on what needs to be achieved in the next 40 years in order to keep long-term options viable for avoiding dangerous levels of warming.

The study is the first of its kind to use a detailed energy system model to analyze the relationship between mid-century targets and the likelihood of achieving long-term outcomes. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 99 Comments »

Categories : Climate News, modeling

IPCC scientist: Global cooling headed our way for the next 30 years?

11 01 2010

UPDATE: The subject of this article, Mojib Latif, has challenged the Daily Mail article and it’s interpretation. In another story at the Guardian, Latif says the interpretation by the Daily Mail and a similar story in the Telegraph is wrongly interpreting his work.

Read the Guardian story here and decide for yourself.  If anyone knows of a contact for Dr. Latif, please leave it in comments as I’ll make this forum available to him should he wish to elaborate further.

h/t to WUWT reader Werner Weber for notifying me.

UPDATE2: Werner Weber writes to me in email:

> I have send him an e-mail, pointing out what happened during the night
> and invite him to take the oportunity to present his views in one of the
> leading sceptics blogs.

=====================================

We’ve been covering a lot of the recent cold outbreaks under the “weather is not climate department” heading. This story however is about both weather and climate and what one IPCC scientist thinks is headed our way.

From NASA Earth Observatory: December temperatures compared to average December temps recorded between 2000 and 2008. Blue indicates colder than average land surface temperatures, while red indicates warmer temperatures. Click for source.

The cold this December and January has been noteworthy and newsworthy. We just posted that December 2009 was the Second Snowiest on Record in the Northern Hemisphere. Beijing was hit by its heaviest snowfall in 60 years, and Korea had the largest snowfall ever recorded since record keeping began in 1937. Plus all of Britain was recently covered by snow.

The cold is setting records too.

Oranges are freezing and millions of tropical fish are dying in Florida, there are Record low temperatures in Cuba and thousands of new low temperature records being set in the USA as well as Europe.

There are signs everywhere, according to an article in the Daily Mail, which produced this graphic below:

According to IPCC scientist Mojib Latif in an article for the Daily Mail,  it could be just the beginning of a decades-long deep freeze. Latif is known as one of the world’s leading climate modelers. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 320 Comments »

Categories : Arctic, Climate News, IPCC, sea ice

Global Lower Tropospheric Temperature Report: December 2009 And For The Year 2009

9 01 2010
January 8, 2010

The December 2009 and year 2009 University of Alabama at Huntsville lower tropospheric MSU temperature data is available. Thanks to Phillip Gentry and John Christy for alerting us to these figures]. I have several comments following the figures.


Comments : 242 Comments »

Categories : climate data

Colliding Auroras Produce an Explosion of Light

8 01 2010
From NASA
Colliding Auroras Produce an Explosion of Light
12.17.09

This three frame animation of THEMIS/ASI images shows auroras colliding on Feb. 29, 2008This three frame animation of THEMIS/ASI images shows auroras colliding on Feb. 29, 2008.
Credit: Toshi Nishimura/UCLA
› Larger Image
› View Animation

A network of cameras deployed around the Arctic in support of NASA’s THEMIS mission has made a startling discovery about the Northern Lights. Sometimes, vast curtains of aurora borealis collide, producing spectacular outbursts of light. Movies of the phenomenon were unveiled at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union today in San Francisco.

“Our jaws dropped when we saw the movies for the first time,” said space scientist Larry Lyons of the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA), a member of the team that made the discovery. “These outbursts are telling us something very fundamental about the nature of auroras.”

The collisions occur on such a vast scale that isolated observers on Earth — with limited fields of view — had never noticed them before. It took a network of sensitive cameras spread across thousands of miles to get the big picture.

NASA and the Canadian Space Agency created such a network for THEMIS, short for “Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms.” THEMIS consists of five identical probes launched in 2006 to solve a long-standing mystery: Why do auroras occasionally erupt in an explosion of light called a substorm?

Twenty all-sky imagers (ASIs) were deployed across the Alaskan and Canadian Arctic to photograph auroras from below while the spacecraft sampled charged particles and electromagnetic fields from above. Together, the on-ground cameras and spacecraft would see the action from both sides and be able to piece together cause and effect-or so researchers hoped. It seems to have worked.

The breakthrough came earlier this year when UCLA researcher Toshi Nishimura assembled continent-wide movies from the individual ASI cameras. “It can be a little tricky,” Nishimura said. “Each camera has its own local weather and lighting conditions, and the auroras are different distances from each camera. I’ve got to account for these factors for six or more cameras simultaneously to make a coherent, large-scale movie.” Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 83 Comments »

Categories : Science, optical phenonmena, space

This WUWT article from 2008 was on Fox News tonight

6 01 2010

From WUWT on March 16, 2008, we found this article and it is now just getting national news exposure. I’m bringing it forward again since there has been a lot of activity in search engine traffic that has found its way here tonight.

Sean Hannity read from it during his Fox News show.

Read the original article here:

November 2nd, 1922. Arctic Ocean Getting Warm; Seals Vanish and Icebergs Melt.


Comments : 129 Comments »

Categories : Arctic, Climate News, media

G.P. Bear goes to Washington – Final Part 12

5 01 2010

By Bill Steigerwald

“G.P. Bear for president”

Of all the animals the Inuit traditionally hunted, Nanuk, the polar bear, was the most prized. Native hunters considered Nanuk to be wise, powerful, and “almost a man.” Some called the bear “the great lonely roamer.” Many tribes told legends of strange polar-bear men that lived in igloos. These bears walked upright, just like men, and were able to talk. Natives believed they shed their skins in the privacy of their homes.

– Polar Bears International

THE NEWSEUM, WASHINGTON, D.C.

“… And with that,” said George Stephanopoulos, “let me bring in our special ‘Roundtable.’ This week, along with George Will, Paul Krugman and Cokie Roberts, we have G.P. Bear, the polar bear who, to put it mildly, caused quite a stir last week in the Senate. Welcome, Mr. Bear.”

“Thank you, George,” Grandpa said, adjusting his red bowtie. “Honored to be here.”

“So, Mr. Bear,” Stephanopoulos said, “you really hit a walk-off home run with your ‘Polar Bear Manifesto.’ Yesterday the Senate passed the Polar Bear Freedom Act ­ by a 99-1 vote.” Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 16 Comments »

Categories : satire

Socioeconomic Impacts of Global Warming are Systematically Overestimated

5 01 2010

Socioeconomic Impacts of Global Warming are Systematically Overestimated

Part I: Why are Impacts Overestimated?

Indur M. Goklany

[Note to the Reader: For the sake of argument, in this post I will accept the IPCC’s estimates of global warming. I will show that even if one takes those estimates for granted, the impacts of global warming are, nevertheless, overestimated.]

Most of the scientific debate on global warming has focused on “climatological” issues that have been the province of IPCC Work Group I’s Science Assessment. However, there are even greater grounds for skepticism when it comes to estimates of the impacts of climate change, which is the monopoly of IPCC’s Work Group II, not least because these estimates are based on a chain of linked models with the uncertain output of each unvalidated model serving as the input for the next unvalidated model. [Yes, it’s that bad!].

The first link in this chain are emission models which use socioeconomic assumptions extending 100 or more years into the future to generate emission scenarios, which strains credulity. As Lorenzoni and Adger (2006: 74) noted in a paper commissioned for the Stern Review, socioeconomic scenarios “cannot be projected semi-realistically for more than 5–10 years at a time.”

Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 73 Comments »

Categories : Agriculture, IPCC, economy-health, modeling

« Previous Entries