Note: this is a NASA illustration for the purpose of this story, it is not from the peer reviewed paper.
There is a a peer-reviewed study in the April 5th issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters. It is by Andrew Monaghan of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, CO. “This is a really important exercise for these climate models,” he said.
Monaghan and his team found that while climate models projected temperature increases of 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.75 degrees Celsius) over the past century, temperatures were observed to have risen by only 0.4 F (0.2 C). “This is showing us that, over the past century, most of Antarctica has not undergone the fairly dramatic warming that has affected the rest of the globe,” Monaghan said. The gap between prediction and reality seemed to be caused by the models overestimating the amount of water vapor in the Antarctic atmosphere. ”
“The research clearly shows that you can actually slow down sea-level rise when you increase temperatures over Antarctica because snowfall increases, but warmer temperatures also have the potential to speed up sea-level rise due to enhanced melting along the edges of Antarctica,” Monaghan said.The gap between prediction and reality seemed to be caused by the models overestimating the amount of water vapor in the Antarctic atmosphere. The cold air over the southernmost continent handles moisture differently than the atmosphere over warmer regions.
But they fail to recognize that there may be a volcanic heat source as well such as the volcanic mountain range comprising much of the Antarctic Peninsula, including volcanoes such as the Seal Nunataks around the Larsen Ice shelf and under the Ross Ice Shelf here.
Volcanic Map Temperature Trends
Antarctica has no statistically significant warming for the last three decades.
There is also a writeup on this new paper at Livescience titled Cold Water Thrown on Antarctic Warming Predictions
Heh. Tony, this may be what you’re looking for:
Some Methyl Bromide (CH3Br) facts :
http://www.igac.noaa.gov/newsletter/19/butler.php
“…Not all methyl bromide is anthropogenic. Most CH3Br in the atmosphere is emitted by natural processes. CH3Br, however, is the source of 50 percent of the Br reaching the stratosphere. …. Stratospheric bromine very efficient at depleting ozone – 50 or 60 times that of chlorine on a per-atom basis. That means that at 10 parts-per-trillion, CH3Br causes the equivalent damage of any one of the major CFC’s at current atmospheric levels…”
AND
http://www.igac.noaa.gov/newsletter/19/yvon-lewis.php
As of 1999 levels, manufactured (fumigant & gasoline) sources of M-Br about 30% of the total, the other 70% being natural processes (biomass burning, rapeseed, rice paddies, salt marshes & oceans). The oceans outgassed ~ 37 percent in 1999. Mfg’d fumigant levels are now below 1999 levels, I have no current data. What the various actual ozone-destroying components near the Antarctic? It’s a complex science, not much in the way of easily accessed information.
I think there are other natural bromine sources, but M-Br is a big one.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/csd/assessments/2006/chapters/Q8.pdf
Get this: GCRF vs. OZONE and GCRF influence on Antarctic temperatures:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7352667.stm
Buried down, deep in the article:
“….The energetic particles induce NOx production … NOx destroys ozone in catalytic reaction cycles; and when you change ozone in the stratosphere, that… can then feed down to surface temperatures…”
“…In periods of relatively intense particle activity, some areas of the Earth’s surface in both the Arctic and Antarctic are warmer while others become colder, showing differences of up to 2C or 3C compared to the long-term averages…”
“…The Antarctic picture is particular fascinating. High particle flux places a big red patch, indicating warmth, over the Antarctic Peninsula, an area that is feeling the impacts of climate change faster than most other parts of the planet.”
That was a lucky one: I serendipitously stumbled upon it, funny it being coincidentally related.
And the climate picture … it just gets curiouser and curiouser.
Chris,
I read your posts in the RSS MSU thread. There is much not known. Some where we need to get back to basics. In a system as complex as the earth we must learn one variable at a time. It is time to reduce the number of assumptions and start to find out what is really happening. I used to trouble shoot on very large telephone PABX systems. They were complex but you had to break them down and perform test to determine what wasn’t working. Sometimes it took a while but in the end you found out what was causing the change in performance. I think that climate science has devolved in to a lot of computerized assumptions and not enough empirical data and field testing/research. I don’t know if anyone is reviewing raw data or if the raw data is available any longer for the past 130 years. I think there are to many adjustments to the data. I think adjusted data because it doesnt fit, or it is different from its near neighbors data, or the recording station is poorly sited or poorly maintained is a false reason. ( here in Alabama you can have a 15f difference in the range of 1/2 mile much less 1000km.
We need to get back to basics. Good Scientific Method.
Bill Derryberry
Serendipitous finding of the day — study discounting GCRF link to climate change cites other weird effects: Ozone destruction *and* regional heating:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7352667.stm
“…The energetic particles induce NOx … [that ] destroys ozone in catalytic reaction cycles; and when you change ozone in the stratosphere, that… can then feed down to surface temperatures..”
“…In periods of relatively intense particle activity … some areas of the Earth’s surface in both the Arctic and Antarctic are warmer while others become colder, showing differences of up to 2C or 3C compared to the long-term averages…”
“…The Antarctic picture is particular fascinating. High particle flux places a big red patch, indicating warmth, over the Antarctic Peninsula, an area that is feeling the impacts of climate change faster than most other parts of the planet…”
The Tenana river near fairbanks Alaska “went out” on May 6th this year. This is the latest melting since 2002 (2002 and 2001 were a day later)….and as shown in the chart supplemented ot the article posted below, this is a very normal date for the thaw, looking back decades..
http://www.nenanaakiceclassic.com/
Methyl Bromide from oceans:
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/1996/95GB02743.shtml
Like I said, those guys are worth a good laugh on a daily basis: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/05/global-cooling-wanna-bet/langswitch_lang/in
Bet on cooling? Only is someone other than James “The Magnifier” Hansen is in charge of the temp data….
Here is the original source of the graphic. It looks like the GISS had their fingers on it but they did not use their station data.
Antarctic Temperature Trend 1982-2004
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=17257
The date range is from 1982 to 2004 so the extreme cooling which occurred in 2007 is not included. I need to find another source of satellite data for the region which will allow me to look at the most current information.
There is some very interesting commentary in the last paragraph associated with the graphic.
“Why is Antarctica getting colder in the middle when it’s warming up around the edge? One possible explanation is that the warmer temperatures in the surrounding ocean have produced more precipitation in the continent’s interior, and this increased snowfall has cooled the high-altitude region around the pole. Another possible explanation involves ozone. Ozone in the Earth’s stratosphere absorbs ultraviolet radiation, and absorbing this energy warms the stratosphere. Loss of UV-absorbing ozone may have cooled the stratosphere and strengthened the polar vortex, a pattern of spinning winds around the South Pole. The vortex acts like an atmospheric barrier, preventing warmer, coastal air from moving in to the continent’s interior. A stronger polar vortex might explain the cooling trend in the interior of Antarctica.”
The first excuse is the now old copout that the Ozone Hole ate my Global Warming!
The second excuse is an AGW heresy. Carbon Dioxide is a minor greenhouse gas except at the poles where water vapor has predicated out of the atmosphere. The primary assumption in the theory of climate forcing is that the North and South Poles heat from the inside out, not from the outside in. It just goes to show how much the Watermelons believe in their own BS.
Mike
So now, the ozone whole wasn’t caused by CFC, it’s caused by global warming. Luckily we were wrong about CFCs because we now have a model for taking action to stop global warming and the ozone hole. 😉
Going from Antarctica to the Arctic:
According to http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.jpg, the 2008 Northern Sea Ice levels are now down to the 2007 levels. (There could be an interesting discussion on Leap Year impact, but I will skip that.) Looking at the images (cyrosphere’s pictures) of the two years’ ice levels, I cannot see how the jpg chart is consistent with pictures, but I will defer to the computer-generated graph instead of trusting my eyes; but I would like to know why my eyes are deceiving me!
Here is my main curiosity: I have also compared current 2008 levels to the “record” in 1980. It seems that in 2008, we are now even with — or even ahead of — 1980 levels except in two places. One area is the Sea of Okhotsk, and I wonder about the impact of China’s black soot pollution there. The other area is the Barents Sea west of Novaya Semlya, and I wonder about the AMO impact of warm ocean currents there.
Inquirer,
I recall (from wind current charts) that E. Asian soot drifts across the Bering & over Alaska / Yukon / NW Terr. It’s also seeding No. Pacific wintertime super-convective T-storms 100’s of Km across, unprecedented, with westerlies bringing these onshore in NW USA.
There are other sources of soot throughout the Arctic & Subarctic. Russian oil rigs in the Arctic & Siberia, for starters, but also shipping which uses tar-like crude that’s very sooty. As the Arctic corridors are opening up, shipping is exploiting it & dumping soot right on top of the fresh ice.
But honestly, your guess is as good as any at the moment, but hopefully there’ll be some REAL FIELD DATA handy by end of summer. Christian Sci. Mon. ran an article last month about an int’l team currently surveying the aerosol sources & effects. It’s a hot topic but the media are largely ignoring it.
One interesting point of conjecture is the heat exchange from the now ice-free surface waters. Over at the NYT’s “dot earth” blog, “paminator” wrote:
“…I disagree that sea ice is always a better insulator than open water. The thermal conductivities of void-free ice and water are similar, as are the thermal emissivities. However, air trapped in the ice or under the ice will greatly improve the insulation properties of the ice cover. A covering of snow will also greatly increase the thermal insulating properties of the sea ice cover. Either way, if you average the solar insolation over the year in the arctic, it is only a third of the thermal emission at the surface of open ocean water. An ice-free arctic ocean between November and February will remove vast amounts of heat energy from the Earth- until it freezes over with ice…”
MattN:
I have a weak stomach so don’t visit RC often but I love the tough talk followed by “this bet ought to come with an escape clause”, i.e., a volcano or similar warmening calamity. Man up, please.
I know you were joking, but all evidence shows that it was always there and always will be. There has been no net change since it was discovered in the 1950s.
Tony,
Did you see the study about GCRf & Polar heating? GFC creates stratospheric NOx that both causes ozone depletion & later aerosol heating in the lower troposphere.
If this is true then we would see higher NOx flux during Polar winters That’d then cause sPiked Springtime heating. This could be ob-servable, right now, due to.to.thiS extended solar ninimum.
Best regards
REPLY: No I have not seen it, I’ve been a bit distracted the last couple of days -Anthony
@Jeff would the Mid -cenTury ozone hole have been bigger during solar minima.? See above ..,…
leebert, not according to NOAA:
http://www.junkscience.com/Ozone/plot9552.gif
http://www.junkscience.com/Ozone/plot35910.gif
The only real changes seem to be seasonal.
Hi Anthony
Yeh, I figure you have a day job & have to wade through lots of comments.
One other question. NPR did a bit about the Argo data not finding the warming anticipated by the climate models.
I was thinking …. the 1998 el Nino burped out a pile of heat & then the next year temperatures dropped almost the same amount in response. Could that be where all that errant heat went?
This makes me think. The warmist models might be half-right. Could it be that the el Nino / la Nina oscillations are gaining in amplitude. They’re modeling a more-stable system. Could that mean the warmists “natural variations” from Los Ninos are actually reflecting the system’s ability to shed the excess heat they can’t find right now?
Another aspect could be the upwelling of warm water going into the Arctic. Most of the year Arctic insolation is weak, meaning that the now-open waters have more emissivity outbound than insolation inbound, a 2:1 ratio.
The gist of this is that the oceans, being real big like they are, are functional heat exchange systems that can shed excess inbound heat from extra warming, making the time constant/heat latency shorter than modeled.
This would explain why we have ice ages but not heat ages. The oceans tend toward a thermal constant and big El Ninos or Arctic thaws will regulate the backlog by shoving the heat back out into space. The Antarctic fringes would thaw in a likewise manner, dumping heat out in the fall and spring before solar heating takes over.
This concept wouldn’t exculpate CO2 terribly well for those who’d like to otherwise, but that might explain the discrepancies that are inciting we skeptics and puzzling the warmists.
I’m also wondering what effect aerosol dimming would have on the surface in the ability of the seas to off-load the heat due to reduced evaporation, and hence, reduced evaporative cooling. I think it’d reduce evaporation in high-aerosol regions but would get offloaded as increased rain clouds elsewhere where surface dimming wasn’t as prevalent (the southern hemisphere?).
Eventually the heat piles up into a big el Nino like ’98. Makes me wonder if the 2000-2007 double set of PDO oscillations were unusual in any regard (amplitude, frequency).
V. Ramanathan, et al, in 2008 noted that the net heating effect of tropospheric brown clouds over the Pacific alone was about 40 percent. That’d reflect a fair amount of surface dimming as well, I reckon (don’t have my handy dandy quick climatology/oceanography data facts almanac handy… :-).
So the next question is whether that’d moderate direct surface heating since the brown clouds are actually net heat traps, or what that’d do for T-storm strength (although the N. Pacific is seeing unusually big winter T-storms from aerosol cloud seeding).
So, watt would this mean? Could the next big release of heat show up early, with heat-burps piling out as aerosol shading increases. Bigger amplitude, both ways, since all that heat leaving the system in one big belch makes for big coolth afterwards, tending toward a self-regulating state.
Is there any merit in this idea? What would the realclimate boys have to say about this?
Best regards,
/lee
Hi Jeff
Thanks for those charts… dang, that’s some noisy data. Had to squint my eyes just to look at ’em.
I’m thinking more in terms of 11-year solar cycles, where the solar inter-cycle transit minima would let in more cosmic rays. The result would be longer-period amplitude changes over time in the regular seasonal flux of the ozone hole.
That is, the seasonal flux of the ozone hole during solar minima would be greater (bigger hole) since GCR -> NOx effects would be bigger. During solar maxima the ozone hole would be smaller.
I do see in your charts (thank you) something of a 5-year period in seasonal flux during the 1960’s and 1970’s, that could match the max & min of the typical solar cycle. Dunno if an overlay of solar cycles would show anything.
(Hint… could you send me a link for a historically smoothed solar cycle graph , I can overlay them… I’m a bit busy working on my car today… 😉
Best regards,
/lee
Can anyone give me dates on the last few warm/cool phases of the Antarctic Oscillation (a/k/a the Southern Annular mode), esp. prior to 1950?
What would cause rain to fall when no visible clouds can be seen above or around you? It happened in NE Oregon last week after a big cold dust storm blew in from a county west of us with a snow covered mountain range in-between. Several people saw a rainbow too, again with no clouds.
Anthony:
A blogger at the Atmoz website had castigated you for posting an outdated image of Antarctica. I submitted a response over there, but for some reason it did not get posted.
NEVERTHELESS…
If you visit the Earth Observatory website, you’ll notice the previous and updated image of Antarctica is respectively based on data provided by “Josefino Comiso, NASA-GSFC” and “Joey Comiso, GSFC” – likely one and the same person, and more than a “PR droid” (as suggested by the blogger).
At
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=17257 (which shows the outdated image):
NASA published:
“This image shows trends in skin temperatures—temperatures from roughly the top millimeter of the land or sea surface—not air temperatures. The data were collected by the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) sensors that were flown on several National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellites. The data come from the AVHRR’s thermal infrared channel—a portion of the light spectrum we can sense as heat but that human eyes cannot see. This image shows temperature trends for the icy continent from 1982 to 2004. Red indicates areas where temperatures generally increased during that period, and blue shows where temperatures predominantly decreased.”
At
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=17838 (showing the updated image)
NASA updated by saying:
“Scientists from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center have been working for several years to create and refine a satellite map of long-term temperature change in Antarctica. This image illustrates long-term changes in yearly surface temperature in and around Antarctica between 1981 and 2007. (An earlier version of this map is pictured in a previous posting on the Earth Observatory.) Places where it warmed over time are red, places where it cooled are blue, and places where there was no change are white.
Making a long-term record out of data from different sensors is challenging because each sensor has its own quirks and may measure temperatures a bit differently. None of the sensors were in orbit at the same time, so scientists could not compare simultaneous observations from different sensors to make sure each was recording temperatures exactly the same. Instead, the team checked the satellite records against ground-based weather station data to inter-calibrate them and make the 26-year satellite record. The scientists estimate the level of uncertainty in the measurements is between 2-3 degrees Celsius.”
Given the stark difference in the imagery (and likely the data upon which they are based) over such a short term, I asked Atmoz whether we are experiencing an ARGO type deja vù by changes in sensor technology. Since Atmoz was beginning to look at ground station data, I also suggested a thorough review particularly for the years 2005-2007. Will you post the foregoing?
REPLY: Thanks for doing that, Atmoz’s new mission in life is findign ways to minimize what I have to say, so I’m not surprised. He failed to read the image caption though, or maybe he did but just didn’t care.
Never mind about my cloudless question. The net has some explanations that appear to explain it well. It happened again today and I noticed that the counties west of us had high wind warnings again, so there is a lot of dust in the area combined with ice crystals in the upper atmosphere. It was also snowing in a 5000 ft mountain pass.
RE: An Inquirer (11:23:56) :
Sea ice book cooking. That is the next great frontier for auditing of climate “data.”
[…] for yourself… Jump to Comments Do the AGW models do a better job of postdicting Antartic temperature changes, or does the Svensmark hypothesis? Hm, […]
I recommend a sacrifice to the Volcano God, in keeping with the cultish attitude of the Warmenistas.