Watts Up With That?

You have to wonder- what were these guys thinking? The only media visual they could have chosen that would send a worse message of forecast certainty was a dart board…or maybe something else?

MIT's "wheel of climate" - image courtesy Donna Coveney/MIT

From Popular Science:

The Greenhouse Gamble: Ronald Prinn, director of MIT’s Center for Global Change Science, and his group have revised their model that shows how much hotter the Earth’s climate will get in this century without substantial policy change. Standing with the group’s “roulette wheel” are, from left to right, Mort Webster, professor in the Engineering Systems Division; Adam Schlosser, principal research scientist at the Center for Global Change Science; Prinn, the TEPCO Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry; and Sergey Paltsev, principal research scientist, MIT Energy Initiative.

Read the rest of this entry »

OR…. There are Increases in Trend with Each Update While The Causes of Downward Biases Are Deleted

Guest Essay by Bob Tisdale:

In the recent WUWT post Something hinky this way comes: NCDC data starts diverging from GISS, the differences between GISS and NCDC global temperature anomaly data was discussed. I commented that the GISS and NCDC global surface temperature anomaly data relied on two different SST datasets.

NCDC has their own SST anomaly dataset for their global surface temperature product, and they calculate anomalies against the base years of 1901 to 2000. GISS has used the NCDC OI.v2 SST anomaly data since December 1981, and before that they had used the Hadley Centre’s HADSST data. GISS then splices the two datasets together. This post does not discuss the HADSST data, but delves into the differences between the multiple NCDC SST anomaly datasets, one of which is used by GISS. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, it took me a week to get it, and finally here it is. Last Friday, May 9th as you may recall NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center had a teleconference which I was not invited to listen in on. But, Doug Biesecker kindly provided the audio.

This press teleconference coincided with SWPC’s announcement of going with the lower Solar cycle 24 prediction curve. Read the rest of this entry »

From the Saudi Gazette

In one of the rare occasions, Saudis enjoy the snowfall in Al-Baha city south-west of Riyadh, Tuesday. Torrential rains pouring down on Al-Baha accompanied by gusty winds were accompanied by snow capping the mountains and covering the valley areas and the forests of Al-Zaraeb and Khayrah.

Read the rest of this entry »

Many have inquired in comments what’s happened to the ICECAP website. My query to Joe D’Aleo was answered this morning, looks like servicide.

I noticed the outage yesterday, AM.  I had emailed and spoke to the hosting customer at [my] hosting support yesterday morning and they said server with ICECAP had hardware failure and they were working in it. I was traveling giving a talk in Chicago yesterday and assumed/hoped it was back up. Found out last evening still out with no estimate for return. I was about to upgrade to a dedicated server with them.

…

I will talk to manager when he comes in this AM. It was not a DOS [attack] it appears. I am home today so I can stay on their case. Usually the outages last minutes with reboot all that has been needed They assure me they back up everything. God forbid if not. I had 3450 stories stored.

From the :

Fox Glacier is one of the world's climate change indicators.

Research by three New Zealand scientists may have solved the mystery of why glaciers behave differently in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.

Geologist David Barrell of GNS Science, Victoria University geomorphologist Andrew Mackintosh and glaciologist Trevor Chinn of the Alpine and Polar Processes Consultancy have helped provide definitive dating for changes in glacier behaviour.

They were part of a team of nine scientists, led by Joerg Schaefer of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New York, who used an isotope-dating technique to get very precise ages for glacial deposits near Mt Cook.

They measured the build-up of beryllium-10 isotopes in surface rocks bombarded by cosmic rays to pinpoint dates when glaciers in the Southern Alps started to recede. The technology is expected to be widely applied to precisely date other glaciers around the world.

Glaciers are sensitive indicators of climate changes, usually advancing when it cools and retreating when it warms.

The first direct confirmation of differences in glacier behaviour between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, the new work topples theories based on climate in the Northern Hemisphere changing in tandem with the climate in the Southern Hemisphere.

The research argues that at times the climate in both hemispheres evolved in sync and at other times it evolved differently in different parts of the world. Read the rest of this entry »

From WOOD-TV, Grand Rapids, MI

Chief Meteorologist Bill Steffen has been a familiar face in West Michigan since 1975.

MSNBC needs to read Bill’s Blog

April 26th, 2009 at 4:55 pm by Bill Steffen under Bill’s Blog, Weather

MSNBC is running a four-part series entitled Future Earth. On their website they say you can “find out why Earth’s climate machine — the North Pole — is melting alarmingly fast. Learn about our planet’s future, and how you can stop its decline.”

First, the North Pole is not “Earth’s Climate Machine”.  There is far more heat and area in the Tropics than at the North Pole.

Second,  YOU can’t stop it’s decline (assuming it’s declining)!  Nature is big – you personally are insignificant compared to nature.  Don’t you wish you had the power to control icecaps!  If you don’t mind some profanity, check out George Carlin’s take on “Saving the Planet”.

Third, MSNBC does not know “our planet’s future”.  The scenario they portray in this piece is about as remote a possibility in the near future (and more than likely the very far future) as the Lions going 16-0 next season.  The Antarctic icecap (which is much bigger than the Arctic icecap) has been growing.  In Sept. 1979 (first year of satellite data) the Antarctic icecap was 18.4 million sq. km.  In Sept. 2008, the Antarctic icecap was at 19.2 million sq. km. That’s a 30-year trend.  Read the rest of this entry »

Shooting At a Rapidly Moving Target

Guest post by Steven Goddard

Arctic ice area has recovered to normal (one standard deviation) levels, so ice area no longer matters.  The issue is now thickness, which is measured by a team of explorers (Catlin) with a tape measure, who intentionally seek out flat (first year) ice for their route.

The team systematically seeks out flatter ice because it is easier to travel over and camp on. Typically, the surface of first‐year ice floes is flatter than that of multi‐year ice floes.

The red line: inconventiently back in the 1 standard deviation range

Arctic ice area back in the normal range Read the rest of this entry »

Pen Hadow extracts drill from an ice hole in this undated photo. Source: Catlin expedition first report

Note: One of the many integrity issues with Catlin is that none of their photos can be dated. Even embedded EXIF information (including date/time done by most digital cameras in use today) has been removed from gallery photos on the website. For all we know this photo above they included in their just released report could have been taken during training. The high photographic angle suggests the photographer was standing on something, but what? Further, no raw data is offered in their first report, we are expected to take it on faith I suppose. Given their admittedly fraudulent biometric readings, and lack of candor on their ice radar, how can we trust anything they publish? So far for a “science” mission I remain unimpressed with the effort or the transparency. – Anthony

Catlin Report Confirms that Satellite Data is Accurate

Catlin just came out with their first ice report (PDF)

The ice thickness measurements that Pen and the team have been able to phone in imply that they are travelling over predominantly thick first‐year ice. Satellite imagery of the area, especially passive microwave imagery (e.g. AMSR and QuikScat data), indicates the area is indeed covered primarily with first‐year ice and a scattering of multi‐year ice floes.

The report summary is :

The results collected in the first month of the Catlin Arctic Survey point to an unexpected lack of thicker Multiyear Ice. Read the rest of this entry »

Guest post by Steven Goddard

Hell Hath No Fury….

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 »

From the Catlin web site today -

Hypothermia Posted by Gaby Dean
Monday, 06 Apr 2009 15:58
In disadvantaged inner cities it’s known in medical circles as Urban Hypothermia.  GPs adopted the term after seeing an increase, during winter, of elderly patients who have switched off their heating, fearful of the cost, and become ill as a result because of the cold.

Chronic, as opposed to acute, hypothermia is the official term. Read the rest of this entry »

Freeman Dyson

This is a well written essay by the New York times on Freeman Dyson. Dyson is one of the world’s most eminent physicists. As many WUWT readers know he is a skeptic of AGW aka “global warming”, even going so far as to signing the Oregon Petition, seen below.

This part really spoke to me:

What may trouble Dyson most about climate change are the experts. Experts are, he thinks, too often crippled by the conventional wisdom they create, leading to the belief that “they know it all.” The men he most admires tend to be what he calls “amateurs,” inventive spirits of uncredentialed brilliance like Bernhard Schmidt, an eccentric one-armed alcoholic telescope-lens designer; Milton Humason, a janitor at Mount Wilson Observatory in California whose native scientific aptitude was such that he was promoted to staff astronomer; and especially Darwin, who, Dyson says, “was really an amateur and beat the professionals at their own game.”

You can read an essay about his views on climate change, posted here on WUWT  on 11/05/2007.

Excerpt: from the NYT article:

IT WAS FOUR YEARS AGO that Dyson began publicly stating his doubts about climate change. Speaking at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University, Dyson announced that “all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated.” Since then he has only heated up his misgivings, declaring in a 2007 interview with Salon.com that “the fact that the climate is getting warmer doesn’t scare me at all” and writing in an essay for The New York Review of Books, the left-leaning publication that is to gravitas what the Beagle was to Darwin, that climate change has become an “obsession” — the primary article of faith for “a worldwide secular religion” known as environmentalism. Among those he considers true believers, Dyson has been particularly dismissive of Al Gore, whom Dyson calls climate change’s “chief propagandist,” and James Hansen, the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and an adviser to Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Dyson accuses them of relying too heavily on computer-generated climate models that foresee a Grand Guignol of imminent world devastation as icecaps melt, oceans rise and storms and plagues sweep the earth, and he blames the pair’s “lousy science” for “distracting public attention” from “more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet.”

“The climate-studies people who work with models always tend to overestimate their models,” Dyson was saying. “They come to believe models are real and forget they are only models.”

If only we could get James Hansen to spend an afternoon with Freeman Dyson. (h/t to Alexandre Aguiar )

New York Times Magazine Preview
The Civil Heretic Read the rest of this entry »

I have no idea what if anything this might mean, but it would be interesting to find out what these bacteria consume and respire. It just goes to show you that we don’t yet know everything about the atmosphere. – Anthony

Bacteria - not the ones in the deep blue skies

From Slashdot h/t to James Stein

Three new species of bacteria, which are not found on earth and highly resistant to ultraviolet radiation, have been discovered in the upper stratosphere by some Indian scientists.

These bacteria, which do not match any species on earth, were found in samples collected through a balloon sent up to the stratosphere in April 2005. The payload consisted of a cryosampler containing 16 evacuated and sterilised stainless steel probes. Throughout the flight, the probes remained immersed in the liquid neon to create a ‘cryopump effect.’ These cylinders after collecting air samples from different heights ranging from 20 to 41 km were parachuted down and safely retrieved, it said.”

Here’s the Indian Space Research Organisation’s press release on the discovery.

From it: Read the rest of this entry »

You may recall Lewis Pugh and his laughable “expedition” in Kayaks last summer to plant flags of nations on the ice. I came a little more respect for this group, since at least they are attempting some science. But given the media coverage and the problems they face in getting any meaningful data, I have my doubts about this project as well. – Anthony

“Occasionally it’s disheartening too when you’ve slogged for a day and then wake up the next morning having drifted back to where you started.” – Pen Hadow

From the BBC:

A team of polar explorers has travelled to the Arctic in a bid to discover how quickly the sea-ice is melting and how long it might take for the ocean to become ice-free in summers.

Pen Hadow, Ann Daniels and Martin Hartley will be using a mobile radar unit to record an accurate measurement of ice thickness as they trek to the North Pole.

The trio will be sending in regular diary entries, videos and photographs to BBC News throughout their expedition.

The Catlin Arctic Survey team started its gruelling trek on 28 February.

From Pen Hadow’s online journal: Conditions have been hard. Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to the Environmental Protection Act - tipping is illegal in the UK

A survey of climate scientists reveals uncertainty in their predictions of changes to the global climate, yet finds that they believe there is a real chance of passing a “tipping point” that could result in large socio-economic impacts in the next two centuries. The expert elicitation was conducted between October 2005 and April 2006 with a computer-based interactive questionnaire completed individually by participants. A total of 52 experts participated in the elicitation (see Table S2 in the PDF below for names and affiliations). The questionnaire included 7 events of crossing a tipping point. Elmar Kriegler and colleagues asked the  climate experts to estimate the likelihood of impacts to components of the climate system under different warming scenarios.

The five systems discussed in the paper concerned major changes in the North Atlantic Ocean circulation, the Greenland and Western Antarctic ice sheets, the Amazon rainforest, and  El Niño. The probabilities given by the experts varied widely, but on average, they assigned significant chances to a tipping point in this or the next century for at least the medium to high warming scenarios.

Using the experts’ more conservative estimates, the authors calculate a 1 in 6 chance that a tipping event will occur if the temperature increase in the next 200 years is between 2 and 4 degrees Celsius. For a higher temperature increase, the probability was just over 1 in 2. According to the authors, the results suggest that the large uncertainties that come with climate predictions do not imply low probability that catastrophic events will occur.

Since the survey was conducted in 2005 and 2006, I wonder if the opinions are equivalent today. They might have gotten more bang for their buck if they’d used a survey company like Gallup. I’m sure the results would be faster.

The paper is titled: Imprecise probability assessment of tipping points in the climate system Read the rest of this entry »