From the USA Today Weather Blog
This has been in my inbox for a couple of weeks, so on a fairly quiet day for weather, I thought I’d put this out there. John Christy of the University of Alabama-Huntsville reported earlier this month that the Earth’s climate change over the past 30 years has been rather uneven: It’s gotten much warmer in the Arctic and, at the same time, cooler in the Antarctic.
Christy and his colleague Roy Spencer, who are known in some quarters as global warming skeptics, use data from satellites to measure the temperature of the Earth. The more well-known NASA GISS and National Climatic Data Center data sets primarily measure surface temperatures.
Overall, Christy found that Earth’s atmosphere warmed an average of about about 0.72 degree F in the past 30 years, according to NOAA and NASA satellites. More than 80 percent of the globe warmed by some amount. However, while parts of the Arctic have warmed by as much as 4.6 degrees F in 30 years, Christy says that much of the Antarctic has cooled, with parts of the continent cooling as much as the Arctic has warmed (see map, above; click to enlarge).
“If you look at the 30-year graph of month-to-month temperature anomalies, the most obvious feature is the series of warmer-than-normal months that followed the major El Nino Pacific Ocean warming event of 1997-1998,” says Christy. “Right now we are coming out of one La Nina Pacific Ocean cooling event and we might be heading into another. It should be interesting over the next several years to see whether the post La Nina climate ‘re-sets’ to the cooler seasonal norms we saw before 1997 or the warmer levels seen since then,” he says.
He adds that most of the warming found in the satellite data has taken place since the beginning of the 1997-98 El Nino, and that Earth’s average temperature showed no detectable warming from December 1978 until the 1997 El Nino.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post reported yesterday that the USA “faces the possibility of much more rapid climate change by the end of the century than previous studies have suggested, according to a report led by the U.S. Geological Survey.”
Buggers! That Washington Post report is just about the most alarming “likely not to happen (their words not mine) thing” I have ever read! Based on such an unlikely sure thing we MUST TAX AND SPEND else the unlikely thing will probably not happen or just might, but it’s a long shot sure thing!!!!
Novoburgo (05:52:58) :
> I find the distortion created by the Mercator projection to always be interesting.
It’s not a Mercator projection, it’s just an unprojected lat/long cartesian grid. Mercator projections that reach the poles are infintely tall.
I posted a longer response a week or two ago about the same issue.
See http://www.colorado.edu/geography/gcraft/notes/mapproj/mapproj.html
John Egan, it is too dumb to speculate once again on fudging. ALL Sea ice publishers showed this:
http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/ice-area-and-extent-in-arctic
A cursory look at the map on which the data are plotted suggests that it is not a Mercator Projection with exaggerated high latitude areas, about which an earlier commenter expressed concern, but rather a Miller Cylindrical Projection. This projection is used specifically to reduce the dreaded distortion of area, but the correction comes at the cost of altering the shape of features appearing at high latitudes.
I want to know why this web site suddenly stopped it’s weekly ice extent updates. Last data is 15th Dec
http://www.socc.ca/seaice/seaice_current_e.cfm
John Cooper (07:24:06)
“burning jet fuel releases not only pollutants, such as nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide, but also large quantities of water vapor, approximately 1.2 pounds for every pound of fuel burned.”
Can someone explain how if is possible to get 1.2 lbs. of water out of 1 lb. fuel? By “Consevation of Mass”, this would seem to be impossible.
Secondly, I thought clouds increased albedo by reflecting heat into space. How are these clouds different?
Reply: The additional mass comes from the oxygen drawn from the surrounding air during combustion. ~ charles the moderator.
Robert A Cook PE (06:07:41) :
Interesting that a man I trust (Christy) is getting warming Arctic temperatures – but NOT in the very, very high reading from Siberia that Dr. Hansen keeps reporting!
The GISTEMP global dataset includes only about 30 Siberian weather stations, most of them are located in big cities and severely contaminated to some extent by artifical warming due to UHI (or bad siting). It seems to me that Hansen and his team like to use UHI-contaminated stations for ‘better results’. For example, I collected my own Siberian dataset, which includes every valuable (at least 20-year long) temperature record from the region what I can find in GHCN and GSOD. My own Siberian station log counts more than 430 weather stations with valuable historical records.
Its all in the clouds! water vapor has been dropping, less clouds, more shortwave energy reaches earth. earth warms. simple. OLR has a positive correlation with temperature at all time scales, the opposite of what would occur if greenhouse warming was responsible! Water vapor has a negative correlation with temperature, the opposite of what would occur if water vapor positive feedback was occurring. Why will no climate scientist compare water with temperature?
Bill Illis: Here’s the ERSST.v3b version of the Southern Ocean SST anomalies.
http://i44.tinypic.com/2uen29u.jpg
It looks like it influences your SAMO data, which would make sense. Looking at this old currents map, the ACC (West Wind Drift in this illustration) reaches well into the South Atlantic.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/Ocean_currents_1943_(borderless)3.png
Somehow I missed your original post on the SAMO back in November. I know I’ve read at least one paper about THC/MOC in the oceans of the Southern Hemisphere, but it was small in the SH compared to the NH.
Happy rest of the Holidays
Bill Illis: Sorry about the map link. It didn’t make the transition well. You’ll have to cut and paste the rest of it into your browser.
Once again, the AGW alarmists agenda is being thwarted by facts. They’ll change their argument (see the phrase ‘Climate Change’) to fit the fact their agenda is being dis-proven by reputable scientists.
We must to continue to scream loud and long because the alarmists have the ears of the incoming U.S. administration.
Thank you for the great work.
~Michael
http://www.cookevilleweatherguy.com
Ric Wearme(10:56:03) wrote:
It’s not a Mercator projection, it’s just an unprojected lat/long cartesian grid. Mercator projections that reach the poles are infintely tall.
Sorry Ric, my mistake. I should have recognized it with the squashed version of Greenland. Change that to “unprojected lat/long cartesian grid.”
I saw a figure, once, as to how much water vapor a hardwood tree puts into the atmosphere through evotranspiration. It was an incredible number. In as much as we’ve cut down hundreds of thousands (millions?) of sq. miles of rain forest, I can imagine that that could have some effect on temperatures.
I would post the number, but I can’t find it. Maybe someone else is better at google than I. 🙁
So much for the Global part of AGW. Just from eyeballing that map, it looks like half the area experienced little to no warming, with significant warming limited to NH high latitudes.
Perhaps what the map is showing is the cumulative effects of thirty years of a positive PDO. It should be interesting to see what the map looks like after thirty years of a negative PDO. Perhaps the warming/cooling areas will even be inverted.
Ron,
I believe it is a Plate Carree projection. This doesn’t distort as much as one moves N & S from the equator as Mercator, but does nevertheless pictorially exaggerate the effects across the Arctic and Siberia. (Likewise for Antairtica, of course).
Such projections seem to be used for almost all global climate related information. The experts of course are used to this – but do the general public/media know or do they largely take the picture presented at face value?
WRT the discussion on man made lakes.
North America used to be have a MUCH higher precentage of its surface in water – as recently as a few thousand years ago.
For example, Lake Lahontan is an ancient lake that just recently dried up. It used to fill the Endorheic basins in Nevada.
You can see a pic of what it looked like on its wiki page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Lahontan
What is interesting about Lahontan is that if man made diversions were ceased, it would begin to grow due to recent cooling in the last few thousand years.
“Surprisingly, the watershed feeding Lake Lahontan is not thought to have been significantly wetter during its highstand than it is currently. Rather, its desiccation is thought to be mostly due to increase in the evaporation rate as the climate warmed.[citation needed] Recent computer simulations (using the DSSAM Model[4] and other techniques) indicate that if precipitation and evaporation rates within the watershed were maintained at their historical yearly maximum and minimum, respectively and if diversions of the Truckee River ceased, the Ice Age extent of Lake Lahontan could return.”
In short, the man-made lakes are pin-pricks of their former natural glory.
I guess this doesn’t really surprise me much, because I didn’t expect the climate to change evenly across the globe in the first place. I envision it as more as a mosaic of changes in both directions in various regions all at once. I tend to view “global averages” as calculated abstractions that don’t mean much to individuals.
Its all those years of B52 and Bear bomber flightsI I tell ya. Now days its tourists going over the pole to eat Sushi or Ski in the Alps or some such..Oops forgot the Alps are snow free according to the Nobel lauriate Gore.
Over the years, I’ve noticed that there seems to be a relatively large number of “sceptics” in Australia and New Zealand. Looking at Christy’s map made me realize why that might be the case. It’s getting colder down there!
RobJM (12:50:56) :
Of course its in the clouds. Specific and relative humidity have been dropping at all pressure levels over the period of record. The record starts in 1948 and it can be accessed here: http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/Timeseries/timeseries1.pl
The largest cloud loss occurs on a seasonal basis in the middle of the year when the land masses of the northern hemisphere heat the atmosphere. So, the northern hemisphere must warm in summer. Paradoxically the greatest effect is seen in the southern tropics where evaporation is at a seasonal low in mid year. That is where the ocean soaks up energy. That delivers persistence and warmer winters at high latitudes.
Because the atmosphere has been gradually drying there is an ever larger response in terms of cloud loss to northern hemisphere land mass warming in mid year as time goes by.
Because the inter-tropical convergence zone is usually north of the equator and this is where the warmest water is located and because the continents are distributed as they are, much of that warm water from the tropics moves north.
Because the Arctic Ice floats on warm water it melts from below.
There are other implications that I cover at http://climatechange1.wordpress.com/ including the reversibility of this warming.
The increase in short wave radiation to the surface during El Nino events has been documented and you can read about it here: http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/8/5565/2008/acp-8-5565-2008.pdf
The relative surface pressure between the South East Pacific and Indonesia gradually shifted to a base state that is more El Nino like over the period of record.
But, the guys who push the AGW agenda are obsessed with original sin. They will not be swayed by reason. And the press favors sensationalism and is therefore irresponsible. Looks like we are going down the wrong path and it will be hard to stop this train.
You think northern hemisphere winter is cold this year. Unless the tropical oceans warm a little in this Southern Summer next northern winter will be colder than this one.
The guys who are in a position to know these things work for NASA. No more data is needed to understand the climate system than what we already have. But these guys want the gravy train to keep on flowing.
I would like to ask Dr. Hansen to plot a course from Halifax, Nova Scotia all the way down to Nassau, Bahamas.
Now obviously his course would be effected by the weather and ocean currents. No problem because he is an expert! And at his disposal are all of the computer models and tools that he may need.
One thing though. He cannot correct his course or take ‘fixes’ along the way. His predetermined course is all that he can use to get him safely into port.
What are the chances that Dr. Hansen can accurately navigate? Zero. It is impossible to get there without taking ‘fixes’ along the way.
CONCLUSION.
Dr. Hansen cannot even closely navigate a vessel from point A to point B by predetermining a course. So if he cannot predetermine the course for a tiny vessel, why do you think he can sail Mother Ship Earth? How can he predetermining her course and know exactly where she will end up?
Psssst. He can’t. There are too many variables.
Make that a “Plate Carree projection.” Same sentiment applies( see my 1st post)!
From that linked USGS Report (Michael S)
Abrupt Climate Change
Final Report, Synthesis and Assessment Product 3.4
Page 20
“.. Studies of past climate demonstrate that abrupt changes have occurred frequently in Earth history, even in the absence of radiative forcing. Although geologic records of abrupt change have been available for decades, the decisive evidence that triggered widespread scientific and public interest in this behavior of the climate system came in the early 1990s with the publication of climate records from long ice cores from the Greenland Ice Sheet (Fig. 1.1). Subsequent development of marine and terrestrial records (Fig. 1.1) that also resolve changes on these short time scales has yielded a wide variety of climate signals from highly resolved and well-dated records from which the following generalizations can be drawn:
• abrupt climate change is a fundamental characteristic of the climate system;
• some past changes were subcontinental to global in extent;
• the largest of these changes occurred during times of greater-than-present global ice volume;
• all components of the Earth’s climate system (ocean, atmosphere, cyrosphere, biosphere) were involved in the largest changes, indicating a closely coupled system response with important feedbacks.
• many past changes can be linked to forcings associated with changes in seasurface temperatures or increased freshwater fluxes from former ice sheets.
..”
Pretty hard to digest for some:
..Studies of past climate demonstrate that abrupt changes have occurred frequently in Earth history…
Ok – the report worries most about triggering such an event through mankinds CO2 emissions and its effect on ice sheets with a lot of “if models are true then it is likely that..” and as Recommendation there is a nice wishlist for future research included.
Anyhow the report suggests that climate change in the past is not so remote and unknown as some are claiming.
Well this part is not likely to go into the News…
This might have been said already… I wonder if it has anything to do with most of the CO2 emissions being from the northern half of the globe?
Whether it’s a Mercator projection, an unprojected lat/long Cartesian grid or a Plate Carree projection the geographically challenged (constituting about 76.28% of the U.S. population) believe that Greenland is twice the size of the U.S., Alaska is a large as Brazil, and the shortest distance between Maine and Moscow is via Paris.
The greater Repulse Bay, Nunavut metroplex goes up 4F and it looks like 15% or the planet is on fire. Ya gotta believe its done that way on purpose.