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The article mentions “great masses of ice have now been replaced by moraines of earth and stones,” and “at many points well-known glaciers have entirely disappeared.”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Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared.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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MattN (08:24:33) :
“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?”
Every piece of temperature data is heavily manipulated by various algorithms intended to ‘correct’ problems in the data. In some cases these algorithms have a precise numerical basis. In many other cases, they are nothing but educated guesses made by people who assume that the temperature has risen.
That said, these manipulations are not necessarily wrong. However, the fact that the manipulations were applied injects a huge amount of uncertainty into the data.
Raven, is data like this: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=431043600000&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
corrected or uncorrected?
What I’ve been doing is going here:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/
and clicking on various places in each continent and looking for long-term data listed as “rural”, or most with a small population. Almost 100% of the rural records covering the 20th century show the 1920s-1930s as warm or warmer than the 1990s-2000s. The only long-term data that shows any significant trend is limited to extremely large urban areas like Tokyo: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=210476620003&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
The data you linked to has some corrections applied.
If you want to know the gory details I recommend the recent CA series:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?cat=50
There is data on NH ice extent which goes back to 1870. See here for a discussion and analysis of that data.
The recent arctic melt breaks records over the entire dataset.
REPLY: That post is a bit stale, there’s no mention of the recent rebound and heading positive anomaly of arctic sea ice extent in it.
Anthony,
“That post is a bit stale”
Well it’s a tad more recent than 1922.
By rebound I think you’re referring to winter, which would put you on thin ice. 🙂
This brings up the questions you must always ask the Global Warming Scare Mongers: Given that the earth has been cooler and warmer than it now is, what should be the temperature of the earth? How will we know when we have reached the right temperature?
Raven, thanks for the link. I’ve seen a few of the CA entries on Hansen’s adjustment. It seems Steve has figured out WHAT Hansen has done, just can’t figure out WHY he did those adjustments. Some make no sense at all. Hansen appears drunk and disorderly with the data adjustments.
Speaking of deltas, isn’t the accumulation of 11 km^2 of NH ice unprecedented?
The ice comes and goes.
Check out the following article from 1817 or was it last year?
http://books.google.com/books?id=_-5rQMHKLi8C&pg=PA334&dq=%22the+cold+that+has+for+centuries+past+enclosed+the+seas%22&sig=_9Iyy4d8NVxnctLuL-rwQXMJcPE#PPA334,M1
Look for letter 132.
It outlines a letter To Robert Dundas With respect to the opening of the Northwest Passage and the disappearance of sea ice.
The report to the Royal society is November 1817.
“… what should be the temperature of the earth? How will we know when we have reached the right temperature?”
ANSWER: The average land / sea temp reached after the final breath of warm CO2 passes the lips of the last AGW denialist.
REPLY: And now we see the real face of this movement revealed.
If the inflamatory remark above was offensive to AGW-ers, I’ll apologize.
Another interesting site for “local weather” reports from U.S. history is “The Weather Doctor”.
http://www.islandnet.com/~see/weather/doctor.htm
It has a number of journal-reported stories on weather.
One called, “Eighteen Hundred and Froze To Death” caught my eye.
Interesting how the Northern Hemisphere ice extents back to the 1880’s demonstrated in Taminos post here especially this image seems to follow pretty well with PDO and solar irradiance as you posted here .
Although pre-satellite data is not going to be nearly as accurate, so who knows what the true numbers are.
Opps, lost a decimal point. 11 million km^2 of ice accumulation this winter.
Anthony,
The Northern Hemisphere ice may not (yet) have a positive anomaly (relative to 1978-2000 mean), but globally, sea ice is at a positive anomaly.
REPLY: That is true.
Wonderful, albeit corrosive, paragraph, papertiger: “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 !!!!”
Anthony, great post. I am new to your site, having been at Bretts site (accuweather) for a while. I sent your 1922 article with your link to everyone in my address book.
I did a quick search and did not see the following mentioned here? I found it quite interesting and I apologize if it is a repeat.
Dr. Gerhard Loebert:
A Compilation of the Arguments that Irrefutably Prove that Climate Change is driven by Solar Activity and not by CO2 Emission
Dr. Gerhard Loebert, Otterweg 48, 85598 Baldham, Germany. March 6, 2008.
Physicist. Recipient of The Needle of Honor of German Aeronautics.
Program Manager “CCV, F 104G” (see Internet).
Program Manager “Lampyridae, MRMF” (see Internet)
Conveyor of a super-Einsteinian theory of gravitation that explains, among many other post-Einstein-effects, the Sun-Earth-Connection and the true cause of the global climate changes.
I. Climatological facts
As the glaciological and tree ring evidence shows, climate change is a natural phenomenon that has occurred many times in the past, both with the magnitude as well as with the time rate of temperature change that have occurred in the recent decades. The following facts prove that the recent global warming is not man-made but is a natural phenomenon.
1. In the temperature trace of the past 10 000 years based on glaciological evidence, the recent decades have not displayed any anomalous behaviour. In two-thirds of these 10 000 years, the mean temperature was even higher than today. Shortly before the last ice age the temperature in Greenland even increased by 15 degrees C in only 20 years. All of this without any man-made CO2 emission!
2. There is no direct connection between CO2 emission and climate warming. This is shown by the fact that these two physical quantities have displayed an entirely different temporal behaviour in the past 150 years. Whereas the mean global temperature varied in a quasi-periodic manner, with a mean period of 70 years, the CO2 concentration has been increasing exponentially since the 1950’s. The sea level has been rising and the glaciers have been shortening practically linearly from 1850 onwards. Neither time trace showed any reaction to the sudden increase of hydrocarbon burning from the 1950’s onwards.
3. The hypothesis that the global warming of the past decades is man-made is based on the results of calculations with climate models in which the main influence on climate is not included. The most important climate driver (besides solar luminosity) comes from the interplay of solar activity, interplanetary magnetic field strength, cosmic radiation intensity, and cloud cover of the Earth atmosphere. As is shown in Section II, this phenomenon is generated by the action of galactic vacuum density waves on the core of the Sun.
4. The extremely close correlation between the changes in the mean global temperature and the small changes in the rotational velocity of the Earth in the past 150 years (see Fig. 2.2 of http://www.fao.org/DOCREP/005/Y2787E/y2787e03.htm), which has been ignored by the mainstream climatologists, leaves little room for a human influence on climate. This close correlation results from the action of galactic vacuum density waves on the Sun and on the Earth (see Section II). Note that temperature lags rotation by 6 years.
5. From the steady decrease of the rotational velocity of the Earth that set in in Dec. 2003, it can reliably be concluded that the mean Earth temperature will decrease again in 2010 for the duration of three decades as it did from 1872 to 1913 and from 1942 to 1972.
6. The RSS AMSU satellite measurements show that the global temperature has not increased since 2001 despite the enormous worldwide CO2 emissions. Since 2006 it has been decreasing again.
II. Physical explanation for the strong correlation between fluctuations of the rotational velocity and changes of the mean surface temperature of the Earth
Despite its great successes, the gravitational theory of the great physicist Albert Einstein, General Relativity, (which is of a purely geometric nature and is totally incompatible with the highly successful quantum theory) must be discarded because this theory is completely irreconcilable with the extremely large energy density of the vacuum that has been accurately measured in the Casimir experiment.
Seaon Theory, a new theory of gravitation based on quantum mechanics that was developed eight decades after General Relativity, not only covers the well-known Einstein-effects but also shows up half a dozen post-Einstein effects that occur in nature. From a humanitarian standpoint, the most important super-Einsteinian physical phenomenon is the generation of small-amplitude longitudinal gravitational waves by the motion of the supermassive bodies located at the center of our galaxy, their transmission throughout the Galaxy, and the action of these waves on the Sun, the Earth and the other celestial bodies through which they pass. These vacuum density waves, which carry with them small changes in the electromagnetic properties of the vacuum, occur in an extremely large period range from minutes to millennia.
On the Sun, these vacuum waves modulate the intensity of the thermonuclear energy conversion process within the core, and this has its effect on all physical quantities of the Sun (this is called solar activity). This in turn has its influences on the Earth and the other planets. In particular, the solar wind and the solar magnetic field strength are modulated which results in large changes in the intensity of the cosmic radiation reaching the Earth. Cosmic rays produce condensation nuclei so that the cloud cover of the atmosphere and the Earth albedo also change.
On the Earth, the steady stream of vacuum density waves produces parts-per-billion changes in a large number of geophysical quantities. The most important quantities are the radius, circumference, rotational velocity, gravitational acceleration, VLBI baseline lengths, and axis orientation angles of the Earth, as well as the orbital elements of all low-earth-orbit satellites. All of these fluctuations have been measured.
Irrefutable evidence for the existence of this new, super-Einsteinian wave type is provided by the extremely close correlation between changes of the mean temperature and fluctuations of the mean rotational velocity of the Earth. (see the figure referred to in Section I.4). Einsteinian theory cannot explain this amazing correlation between two physical quantities that seem to be completely unrelated.
While the rotational velocity of the Earth and the thermonuclear energy conversion process on the Sun react simultaneously to the passage of a vacuum density wave, a time span of 6 years is needed for the energy to be transported from the core of the Sun to the Earth’s atmosphere and for the latter’s reaction time.
As can be seen, super-Einsteinian gravitation reveals the true cause of climate change.
REPLY: It is the music of the spheres, interconected.
Which is why the whole idea of a 1979 – 2000 baseline for ice extent is foolhardy. The appropriate baseline may be something far different than the 1979 – 2000 mean.
1999:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/286/5446/1934
“Surface and satellite-based observations show a decrease in Northern Hemisphere sea ice extent during the past 46 years.”
Isn’t it interesting that Tamino claims NH sea ice has been declining since 1965 … and this paper says NH Sea Ice has been declining since 1933.
I guess AGW works better if you don’t point
You know … if Tamino said the sky was blue, I would check.
An alternative point of view:
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2007/10/30/arctic-sea-ice-another-hockey-stick/
“But, despite these shortcomings, it is interesting to note that the Russian reconstruction includes a far greater degree of interdecadal variation, including a large decline from 1900 to the 1940s, a recovery from the 1940s into the late 1960s (quite possibly underestimated due to insufficient data during the early part of this period), and a then a subsequent decline to the present.”
So much of the story of the past, not least regarding glaciers, is remarkably well-told in Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie’s, Times of Feast, Times of Famine, published in 1971. The data of the glacial retreat (hardly glacial in its rapidity) in the 1940s and early 1950s (esp. p. 96) contrasts with the current panic about retreating glaciers (BBC News, 16 Mar 2008).
[…] and 30’s 18 03 2008 Two days ago I highlighted a news story from the Washington Post Arctic Ocean Getting Warm; Seals Vanish and Icebergs Melt. That brought a flood of interest and some other interesting finds along with it as other readers […]
An even older GW story:
Part I of Chapter IX: The State of Germany till the Invasion of the Barbarians, in the Time of the Emperor Decius of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon originally published in 1776:
Some ingenious writers have suspected that Europe was much colder formerly than it is at present; and the most ancient descriptions of the climate of Germany tend exceedingly to confirm their theory. The general complaints of intense frost and eternal winter, are perhaps little to be regarded, since we have no method of reducing to the accurate standard of the thermometer, the feelings, or the expressions, of an orator born in the happier regions of Greece or Asia. But I shall select two remarkable circumstances of a less equivocal nature. 1. The great rivers which covered the Roman provinces, the Rhine and the Danube, were frequently frozen over, and capable of supporting the most enormous weights. The barbarians, who often chose that severe season for their inroads, transported, without apprehension or danger, their numerous armies, their cavalry, and their heavy wagons, over a vast and solid bridge of ice. Modern ages have not presented an instance of a like phenomenon. 2. The reindeer, that useful animal, from whom the savage of the North derives the best comforts of his dreary life, is of a constitution that supports, and even requires, the most intense cold. He is found on the rock of Spitzberg, within ten degrees of the Pole; he seems to delight in the snows of Lapland and Siberia: but at present he cannot subsist, much less multiply, in any country to the south of the Baltic. In the time of Cæsar the reindeer, as well as the elk and the wild bull, was a native of the Hercynian forest, which then overshadowed a great part of Germany and Poland. The modern improvements sufficiently explain the causes of the diminution of the cold. These immense woods have been gradually cleared, which intercepted from the earth the rays of the sun. The morasses have been drained, and, in proportion as the soil has been cultivated, the air has become more temperate. Canada, at this day, is an exact picture of ancient Germany. Although situated in the same parallel with the finest provinces of France and England, that country experiences the most rigorous cold. The reindeer are very numerous, the ground is covered with deep and lasting snow, and the great river of St. Lawrence is regularly frozen, in a season when the waters of the Seine and the Thames are usually free from ice.
==========================
His land use change theory has similarities to more contemporary science like Roger Pielke Sr. e.g.
I live in the Far North, and I agree with Robert Norwood — people can play endless games of one-upmanship, or they can plan for living in an environ-ment which does not have the same degree of climate stability that we have historically enjoyed. Some years ago, NOVA had a great graphic on climate change — they showed a timeline going back to about 8,000 BC, with all the peaks and valleys of climate variability. THEN, they extended the line back to about 30,000 BC. Guess what ? In comparison, the line back to 8,000 BC looked FLAT. Temperatures were so much more variable before that time that agriculture would have been virtually impossible. A great visual.
About 1000AD, the ice along the arctic coast melted so fast that the Inuit, who had dog sled technology, were able to follow whales which moved north and it only took the Inuit about 100-200 years to get from the west coast of Alaska clear to Greenland, replacing the more sedentary Dorset as they went. Then the ice closed in again, but the Inuit were established. At that same time, the Norsk were settling Iceland and Greenland, but had to abandon Greenland when the climate chilled down.
The thing is, we don’t know what to expect, but we have built a very complex society based on an expectation of continuance of the norm. Living in the Far North requires one to adapt to the most extreme changes on a yearly basis. In the old days it meant adapt or die. Now it means adapt or fly away to somewhere more clement. But up here we realize that climate change may mean more extremes in every direction, not just ‘global warming’. THAT is what people should prepare for.
And arctic ice ‘rebound’ is first-year ice, thin and easily melted, unlike the thick, dense multi-year ice which disappeared so dramatically in 2007. I think this melting is being driven by suboceanic magma flow myself.
I’m not sure whether it is too late to comment on this post, but I thought this item spliced in nicely to the 1922 warming. It involves 1817 polar melting, and I found the quote, apparently written in 1817, at:
http://www.john-daly.com/polar/arctic.htm
“It will without doubt have come to your Lordship’s knowledge that a considerable change of climate, inexplicable at present to us, must have taken place in the Circumpolar Regions, by which the severity of the cold that has for centuries past enclosed the seas in the high northern latitudes in an impenetrable barrier of ice has been during the last two years, greatly abated.
(This) affords ample proof that new sources of warmth have been opened and give us leave to hope that the Arctic Seas may at this time be more accessible than they have been for centuries past, and that discoveries may now be made in them not only interesting to the advancement of science but also to the future intercourse of mankind and the commerce of distant nations.”
President of the Royal Society, London, to the Admiralty, 20th November, 1817
[…] In this blog I often cite historical perspectives on how people and the press have perceived and written about climate in the past, such as this article from the New York Times that says “the Arctic will soon be an open sea” or this one from the 1933 Monthly Weather Review “IS OUR CLIMATE CHANGING? A STUDY OF LONG-TIME TEMPERATURE TRENDS.”, or this one from 1922 “Arctic Ocean Getting Warm; Seals Vanish and Icebergs Melt.“ […]
[…] You ask, I provide. November 2nd, 1922. Arctic Ocean Getting Warm; Seals Vanish and Icebergs Melt. …: Click the article to see the full article changing-arctic_monthly_wx_review.png. […]