Roger Carr recently wrote in comments:
HELP WANTED: I am trying to purchase (or plunder) a full copy of this story, mentioned here on this forum:
A Washington, D.C. resident John Lockwood was conducting research at the Library of Congress and came across an intriguing headline in the Nov. 2, 1922 edition of The Washington Post: Arctic Ocean Getting Warm; Seals Vanish and Icebergs Melt.
The article mentions “great masses of ice have now been replaced by moraines of earth and stones,” and “at many points well-known glaciers have entirely disappeared.”
The original source of the story resurfacing recently was from an Inside the Beltway column of August 14th, 2007. The newspaper article was located in the Library of Congress archives by James Lockwood.
Here is the text of the Washington Post (Associated Press) article:
The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft, at Bergen, Norway.
Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm.
Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.
UPDATE:
The source report of the Washington Post article on changes in the arctic has been found in the Monthly Weather Review for November 1922. It is much more detailed than the Washington Post (Associated Press) article. It seems the AP heaviliy relied on the report from Norway Consulate George Ifft, which is shown below. See the original MWR article below and click the newsprint copy for a complete artice or see the link to the original PDF below:
Click the article to see the full article changing-arctic_monthly_wx_review.png.
The PDF of that page exists here from NOAA’s archives. Thanks to Michael Ronayne for locating it and many other resources you can find in the comments section below.
If Yogi Berra were here to comment on the hullabaloo over the changes in the arctic today, I’m pretty sure he’d say. “It’s Deja Vu all over again”.
😉
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Neill~ Before I moved to Canada, the mail-order pharmacy I was working at was still shipping meds to Jerry Garcia. We figure he was with Elvis. Yogi might just be hanging out with them, ya know?
Nothing more than “propaganda”. It will no longer “stick”.
I’m going to disappoint people on both sides of this issue. First, Although we live on the cooled, dry, crust of a volcanic planet we tend not to see things, events, in terms of, say, geologic time or time frames that can actually tell us something. Evaluating what is happening now, such as global warming, by looking at the last 150 years to present is not a lot of help so sure, we get misleading information on the subject. Yeah, yippee, we don’t have to get off our lazy cans and actually do something, like act environmentally responsible. Or do we? Here’s the inescapable truth and it will bum some folks out. While we may or may not be the direct cause of global warming, our planet and everything associated with it is part of a balanced system. Any impacts to it will have positive or negative effects which will, in turn, help or harm us; the latter being more the case. There is not one molecule of evidence to suggest that we, humans, have a positive impact on the planet. In terms of that, a seagull has more benefit . It is, therefore, a “good bet” that climate change is real and in part associated with us. The question is: how much is really us and can anything be done about it before future generations – our children, are harmed or even devastated by it. Can we change in a way that will ensure future generations a chance at life without global famine, starvation, poverty, societal collapse and strife? What are we working towards? What are you working towards?
We can play some one-upsmanship on the issue or we can try for a better future whether we are “warming” or not.
Robert Norwood (14:29:53) says:
“Can we change in a way that will ensure future generations a chance at life without global famine, starvation, poverty, societal collapse and strife? What are we working towards? What are you working towards?”
But the devil is in the details. What do we do? If CO2 is the problem then we can justify spending trillions pumping the stuff underground. However, if CO2 is a red herring then that money would be wasted.
Many sceptics are environmentalists who fear that this obession will CO2 will hurt the environment in the long run because people will be fooled into believing that cutting CO2 is the only thing they need to do. The papal indulgences called carbon offsets are perfect examples.
What are we working towards? Scientific knowledge, and ultimately, Truth, which is the exact opposite of what the AGWers want. AGW is a huge lie, and lies are the basis for totalitarian governments.
I did some poking around with google earth. The reference point 81.5 deg north is slightly north of Svalbard (the island to the east of greenland and to the north of iceland). According to illinois cryrosphere that latitude had ice in every August I checked from 1979 to 2007.
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=08&fd=16&fy=1979&sm=08&sd=16&sy=2007
In other words this report suggests that there was less ice that part of the arctic in august 1922 than there was during the ‘record setting’ melt of 2007.
For someone who was long dead before the Internet, George Nicolas Ifft has quite a data trail in Google. Apparently he and other State Department consuls were expected to file detailed reports about the countries in which they served.
Two spelling of his name appear in Google, which has already indexed my earlier post on Mr. Ifft.
Here are the records for the George Nicolas Ifft.
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22George+Nicolas+Ifft%22&hl=en&safe=active&filter=0
Most of these the reports for George Nicholas Ifft appear to be family members but some are of interest to us.
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22George+Nicholas+Ifft%22&hl=en&safe=active&filter=0
The reporting levels from consuls were so extensive that the New York Times took note of the fact in 1914.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9D04E4D61E39E633A25753C1A9639C946596D6CF
“MOVIES” REIGN EVERYWHERE; Reports from All Over the World Show They Stand High in Popular Favor.
May 10, 1914, Sunday
Section: Magazine, Page SM5, 774 words
AMERICAN Consuls in European and other foreign countries have recently been sending reports to Washington on the motion picture industry, these reports showing that east and west, north and south, the “movies” now hold sway and are playing a star role in the amusements of the nations.
Even the transatlantic travels of the Ifft family are recorded between Europe and their home in Pocatello Idaho.
http://www.ellisislandrecords.org/search/matchMore.asp?kind=exact&FNM=&LNM=ifft&x=53&y=3&dwpdone=1
The reports of consuls could be an interesting source of firsthand information on many subjects.
Mike
Reply to Robert Norwood:
Robert
As the sun ages, it gets hotter. Someday, in the distant future, it will be putting out so much heat that living things will not be able to live on this planet. Us humans will be the force that will take samples of life and move from this inhospitable planet to another hospitable one. That is the destiny of our species.
Interesting that in the article quoted, Ifft describes the melt as “favourable ice conditions”. Pity the present day commentators aren’t as circumspect.
In 1845, John Franklin tried to navigate an Arctic waterway, only to become trapped in ice in an area that had been much warmer two decades before. Clearly the amount of Arctic ice is cyclical in the long term.
I drew a line on top of the August 16th, 2007 ice extent at 81deg 29minutes:
http://img186.imageshack.us/img186/8093/summer2007lh3.png
As you can see there is no way a boat would have reported ice free waters at that latitude in August 2007. The comparison even gets worse if you look at recent cooler years such as 2000.
Frankly, I was surprised at the result and I expected the 2007 melt to be much further than the melt in 1922. The fact that it is even close suggests that the recent melt of the arctic ice may not be as unprecedented as many people claim.
REPLY: Raven are you sure of the image you created? Thinking of making a new post around it and other info I? have. -Anthony
My earlier post I’m guessing was deleted because it was not a direct link? I found the original below. Interesting read.
IS OUR CLIMATE CHANGING? A STUDY OF LONG-TIME TEMPERATURE TRENDS
http://docs.lib.noaa.gov/rescue/mwr/061/mwr-061-09-0251.pdf
REPLY: Hi DR, perhaps your earlier post got caught in the SPAM filter, that sometimes happens. Thanks for providing this resource, it is quite interesting.
It was a quick mock up eyeballing on my screen with google earth so the error bars are at least +/-0.5 deg. It was a good faith effort and I did not intentionally cherry pick. To do something worthy of seperate post it would be best to sort out when exactly they collected their data and plot their trip. This could all be put on a google earth map file. I would be willing to look at doing this. You can send me an email if you want to discuss further.
(you don’t need to post this message on the forum).
The more one becomes aware of (climate) history the less credence the statement “unprecedented” this or that becomes.
I was messing around with the CET temperatures the other day and in the period ~1695 to 1733 the temperature climbed at a rate of 4 deg C/ century and there are other examples in that record of ~ 1.5 Deg/ century increases and decreases of temperature.
I guess if Al was living in those days he would be out burning witches and trading broomsticks credits.
Those wishing to explore the topic of Arctic conditions in the 1930s might research the “Second International Polar Year”, which I believe was 1933.
BTW, I suspect that most of the Second International Polar Year reports are sitting in libraries, collecting dust. The most interesting data probably has to be found the old-fashioned (pre-Google) way – searching library shelves.
One more Monthly Weather Review short article on Arctic ice, from 1930:
http://docs.lib.noaa.gov/rescue/mwr/059/mwr-059-05-0202c.pdf
IT COOLED OFF DUE TO A LITTLE KNOW LEAGUE OF NATIONS TREATY BANNING MAN-MADE CO2.
Here is a google earth file with overlays for the August sea ice for 1980 and 2002: http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=1134236&page=0&vc=#Post1134236
The ice extent data comes from here:
http://nsidc.org/data/g02169.html
The data only goes up to 2002, however, the 1980 and 2002 clearly demostrated that the ice extent in 1922 was comparable to recent times and that the arctic ice extent increased between 1922 and 1980.
[…] This just in from the Washington Post: The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft, at Bergen, Norway. […]
I’m a newby here. Will someone post a link to what the Mann hockey stick looks like after McKitric and McIntyre’s statistical corrections are applied? Actually, a before and after would be better. Thanks.
REPLY: I don’t hae the graph here, but check on http://www.climateaudit.org and post the same message on unthreaded #32 there and you’ll get a response.
This guy here has a website examining in detail the climate scientist’s peer reviewed “et al”s, from the first climate stations put in the Arctic right on through to the heatwaves of the 40’s.
Link – He has maps of ice extent in the spitzenberg and surrounds in pencil by the climate people who lived in the early 1900.
Get this.
Instead of blaiming global warming on co2, the climate scientists of the 1920’s (probably urged on by their socialist drinking buddies) were blaiming it on World War 1 Naval activity.
Another one of those cases of seeing a causative agent you don’t like, and then inventing a terrible life changing result, to fool the public into action.
“We can’t keep building those battleships – think of the children in the next century (2000) who will have to live in the steambath future world !!!!”
MIKE (and the others who are interested in the Norwegian political expansionist angle): the Norwegian ambassador to the US covering this period (he was in office 1910 – 1927) was Helmer Halvorsen Bryn – my great-grandfather. He played a key role in negotiating Norwegian control of the coal in Spitzbergen. The Norwegian explorer Fritjof Nansen also got involved in US-Norwegian government negotiations. Perhaps if you search around a bit including the name Bryn or “HH Bryn” or variants, you will find more.
Great find! There’s plenty of evidence that shows a natural heating and cooling of the earth take place every so often. Let’s not forget that 2012 is right around the corner, so we all need to prepare for doomsday. Then after 2012, we need to find another end of the world date. Perhaps from Penguins or some other ancient culture.
Guys, I gotta tell you, I’ve been playing around with the links that Bruce posted a few days ago from the GISS site. I’ve been searching for long term (at least 1900-2000) rural data. There is very very little to find. A whole bunch of stations start in the 1940s and 1950s. Of the few stations I found in the GISS network that have data covering the entire 20th century, nearly every one of them has the 1920s-1930s as warm, if not warmer, than the current period. Which begs the question how they have determined the global temperature was so much less in that period compared to today when all the data I can find covering that period says it’s roughly the same?