Above: Mt Erebus, Antarctica
picture by Sean Brocklesby
A press release today by the University of Washington makes a claim that Antarctica is warming and has been for the last 50 years:
“The study found that warming in West Antarctica exceeded one-tenth of a degree Celsius per decade for the last 50 years and more than offset the cooling in East Antarctica.”
…
“The researchers devised a statistical technique that uses data from satellites and from Antarctic weather stations to make a new estimate of temperature trends.”
…
“People were calculating with their heads instead of actually doing the math,” Steig said. “What we did is interpolate carefully instead of just using the back of an envelope. While other interpolations had been done previously, no one had really taken advantage of the satellite data, which provide crucial information about spatial patterns of temperature change.”
Satellites calculate the surface temperature by measuring the intensity of infrared light radiated by the snowpack, and they have the advantage of covering the entire continent. However, they have only been in operation for 25 years. On the other hand, a number of Antarctic weather stations have been in place since 1957, the International Geophysical Year, but virtually all of them are within a short distance of the coast and so provide no direct information about conditions in the continent’s interior.
The scientists found temperature measurements from weather stations corresponded closely with satellite data for overlapping time periods. That allowed them to use the satellite data as a guide to deduce temperatures in areas of the continent without weather stations.
…
Co-authors of the paper are David Schneider of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., a former student of Steig’s; Scott Rutherford of Roger Williams University in Bristol, R.I.; Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University; Josefino Comiso of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.; and Drew Shindell of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City. The work was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation.
Anytime Michael Mann gets involved in a paper and something is “deduced” it makes me wary of the veracity of the methodology. Why? Mann can’t even correct simple faults like latitude-longitude errors in data used in previous papers he’s written.
But that’s not the focus of the moment. In that press release they cite NASA satellite imagery. Let’s take a look at how the imagery has changed in 5 years.
NASA’s viewpoint – 2004
Click for larger image
NASA’s Viewpoint 2007 (added 1/22)
NASA’s viewpoint – 2009
Earth’s viewpoint – map of Antarctic volcanoes
From the UW paper again:
“West Antarctica is a very different place than East Antarctica, and there is a physical barrier, the Transantarctic Mountains, that separates the two,” said Steig, lead author of a paper documenting the warming published in the Jan. 22 edition of Nature.
But no, it just couldn’t possibly have anything at all to do with the fact that the entire western side of the Antarctic continent and peninsula is dotted with volcanoes. Recent discovery of new volcanic activity isn’t mentioned in the paper at all.
From January 2008, the first evidence of a volcanic eruption from beneath Antarctica’s ice sheet has been discovered by members of the British Antarctic Survey.
The volcano on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet began erupting some 2,000 years ago and remains active to this day. Using airborne ice-sounding radar, scientists discovered a layer of ash produced by a ’subglacial’ volcano. It extends across an area larger than Wales. The volcano is located beneath the West Antarctic ice sheet in the Hudson Mountains at latitude 74.6°South, longitude 97°West.
UPDATE 1/22
In response to questions and challenges in comments, I’ve added imagery above and have a desire to further explain why this paper is problematic in my view.
The author of the paper himself (Steig) mentions the subglacial heat source in a response from “tallbloke” in comments. My issue is that they don’t even consider or investigate the possibility. Science is about testing and if possible, excluding all potential candidates that challenge your hypothesis, and given the geographic correlation between their output map and the volcanic map, it seems a reasonable theory to investigate. They didn’t.
But let’s put the volcanoes aside for a moment. Let’s look at the data error band. The UAH trend for Antarctica since 1978 is -0.77 degrees/century.
In a 2007 press release on Antarctica, NASA’s describes their measurement error at 2-3 degrees, making Steig’s conclusion of .25 degrees Celsius over 25 years statistically meaningless.
“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.”
That is from this 2007 NASA press release, third paragraph.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=8239
Also in that PR, NASA shows yet another satellite derived depiction which differs from the ones above. I’ve added it.
Saying you have a .25 deviation over 25 years (based on one-tenth of a degree Celsius per decade per Steig) with a previously established measurement uncertainty of 2-3 degrees means that the “deduced” value Steig obtained is not greater than the error bands previously cited on 2007, which would render it statistically meaningless.
In an AP story Kenneth Trenberth has the quote of the day:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090121/ap_on_sc/sci_antarctica
“This looks like a pretty good analysis, but I have to say I remain somewhat skeptical,” Kevin Trenberth, climate analysis chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said in an e-mail. “It is hard to make data where none exist.”
Atmospheric ozone is measured in Dobson Units, named for the Oxford academic Gordon Miller Bourne Dobson (1889-1976), one of the pioneers of atmospheric ozone research and inventor of the Dobson Spectrophotometer, used to measure atmospheric ozone from the ground. During the International Geophysical Year of 1956 there was a significant increase in the number of these devices in use around the globe and the Halley Bay (Antarctica) anomaly was discovered. Yes, that’s 1956, three decades prior to the allegedly alarming “discovery.” There was a significantly different perspective then because interest was focused on the November increase – now called a “recovery” – in stratospheric ozone levels over Antarctica with the collapse of the South Polar Vortex.
In a paper titled “Forty Years’ Research on Atmospheric Ozone at Oxford: A History” (Applied Optics, March 1968), Dobson described an ozone monitoring program that began at Halley Bay in 1956.
When the data began to arrive, “the values in September and October 1956 were about 150 [Dobson] units lower than expected. … In November the ozone values suddenly jumped up to those expected. … It was not until a year later, when the same type of annual variation was repeated, that we realized that the early results were indeed correct and that Halley Bay showed a most interesting difference from other parts of the world.”
So, if the air is not warmer and if it is not snowing more and there seem to be a little more liquid output than input in the antactica… then the heat source must come from the earth.
Nice write up. You must be hated for questioning something that is so accepted and using facts to base your argument on. I say keep up the excellent work and force those who believe blindly to ask questions and prove via experimentation again, and again, and again – the old school science way.
Well the Goracle speaks to Congress next week, that clears up the timing issue. Had to get those headline lies out now.
Simon Evans (15:23:38) :
I think you have misunderstood my point. If a bias in a station reading is consistent, then the trend can be accurately assessed,
And you sir, have completely missed mine. THERE CAN BE NO TREND OF LESS THAN ONE DEGREE. PERIOD.
I don’t care what your calibration error is.
I don’t care how you do the measuring.
I don’t care how you process the data.
I don’t care how biased the data are.
Your accuracy is measured in degrees. There can be no precision that is valid in less than full degree increments. There can be no trend of less than full degrees. ANY claim of a trend IN EITHER DIRECTION of fractional degrees is a mathematical farce.
This isn’t up for debate, it is a fact of mathematics.
regardless of calibration. If it is not consistent then that, of course, is another matter, and precision is irrelevant (I agree).
Precision is always relevant, and it MUST be less than or equal to the accuracy of the data gathered. Always. For both warmers and coolers.
Frankly, I think the topic ought to be #1 on the ‘why the whole thing is bunk for both sides’ hit parade.
There can be no trend, for either warmers or skeptics, that is measured in less than full degree increments. The accuracy of the temperature data simply do not support it. Every single paper that makes any claim of fractional degree findings based on the full degree temperature record is simply playing in the error band of their calculations.
If I have 4 or 5 quarts of milk and I add 1 quart of milk, I can have anywhere from 5 to 6 quarts of milk, but I CANNOT say that I have 5.5 quarts. It is a lie.
(Strictly, I could have from 3.5 + .5 = 4 to 5.4+1.4 = 6.8 and still fit in the error band of my accuracy of full digits. Do you now see the fallacy of calculating with .x when X. is all you have? )
Phil [15:40:04]
Scathingly, Trenberth says it all: “It’s hard to make data where none exist”. Unfortunately as we know all too well, that has never stopped Mike Mann from concocting whatever data he has needed for his pseudo scientific fantasies. The other authors must somehow have been desperate to consort with a confirmed cheat. [ref: McIntyre and Wegman’s Senate hearings, etc., etc.]
What has been completely lost is that the authors actually state that they can’t rule out that the results may simply be due to “normal, natural variations in the Antarctic weather” [sic] [ N.B.:not climate but weather ! ].
Lee Kington (16:23:20) :
I’m not attacking Spencer and Christy. I’m pointing out that they made a large series of rather disgraceful errors over a very long period that were repeatedly corrected by other scientists in the scientific literature (I’ll post a list if you like). That’s not really an “attack”…it’s a statement of fact.
These errors were not “minor”! For a long period they attempted to pursue the notion that tropospheric temperature showed a cooling trend. Their 2005 correction raised their tropospheric warming trend by 40%. These corrections were made following highlighting of serious errors by other scientists.
The UAH data is now reasonably in accord with other data (e.g. RSS) thanks to these series of corrections. It makes perfect sense for the IPCC to use all the relevant data.
As for Mann and Briffa “just making data up” I’d like to see the scientific papers that justify such an odd statement. After all one of the obvious conclusions from reading the scientific papers on this subject is how well Mann’s (was Briffa invoved in the 1998 study?) tentative analysis has stood the test of time.
That’s certainly not the case with Spencer and Christy’s initial study [Spencer RW, Christy JR (1990) Precise Monitoring Of Global Temperature Trends From Satellites. Science 247, 1558-1562], which was wrong at the time and continued to be wrong until the practitioners were guided towards a proper analysis during the subsequent 15 years…
foinavon : “I’m pointing out that they made a large series of rather disgraceful errors over a very long period that were repeatedly corrected by other scientists in the scientific literature (I’ll post a list if you like). That’s not really an “attack”…it’s a statement of fact.”
That holds true for Dr. Mann as well, except he refuses to correct even his most basic errors, like a series of data points that have erroneous latitudes and longitudes. That Mann error now spans two papers and 10 years.
In the case of Spencer and Christy, peer review solved problems that they were unaware of. Science worked like it should. In the case of Dr. Mann peer review failed, and his stubborness to pay any attention to anyone but his peers has shown him to be more about protecting his position than fact.
Lee Kington (15:25:11) : That led to this graph of VEI 4 or larger eruptions:
http://penoflight.com/climatebuzz/MajorVol1.jpg
Looks like the same data, though the one I was thinking of had a bar chart. Thanks!
I finally got mad that RC would not post my polite comments to discuss the study so I got mad and tried to get them to post this. I doubt it ever will be posted.
Using the AGW crowds own definitions, does anyone see where I made an error?
Casual reader, most of what is on WUWT is way over my head.
I have had a short email conversation with one of the authors of the paper, I read about it in the Seattle Times a few days ago and was hoping I could pass the email on to someone that actually knows something more about this than I do. Did not feel comfortable posting it for the world to see. Was not able to find contact info for the site.
REPLY: info “at” surfacestations dot org
“”” foinavon (15:55:28) :
John Galt (14:45:13) :
re: your request for climate scientists to “debate” the deniers”, and my comment about the frutlessness of that:
<>
Or Dr Richard Lindzen. He pursued for a number of years the dubious notion that enhanced tropospheric water resulting as a feedback to greenhouse gas atmospheric warming would result in a cooling effect in complete contradiction to the predictions from our understanding of atmospheric physics. “”
Well foinavon, I would say that if that is”the prediction from (y)our understanding of atmospheric physics.” that clearly your understanding of atmospheric physics is incomplete.
Note the statement refers to “enhanced tropospheric water”.
As I am sure you know, atmospheric water is unique among green house molecules, since it alone in the atmosphere exists in all three phases, solid, liquid, and gaseous. Every other prominent GHG is present only in the gaseous phase.
While water in the gaseous phase is certainly a positive feedback warming influence (or else earth would be a frozen ball), in the liquid or solid phases, water forms CLOUDS, the result of which is a cooling negative feedback; and notably clouds are not fully modelled in the so-called GCMs.
It isn’t rocket science; nobody has ever observed it to warm up when a cloud passes between the sun and the observer; it ALWAYS cools down. Moreover the optics of the situation is 8th grade high school atmospheric physics. The sun is a narrow angle (0.5 deg) source, so clouds cast a direct shadow, with a narrow penumbral edge,a nd within that shadow zone, the surface irradiance is diminished by reflection from the top of the cloud, and absorption by the water in the cloud.
On the other hand the reduced thermal radiation from teh shadow zone, is diffuse; at least Lamberitan, and more likely closer to isotropic; so the cloud that formed the shadow, can never intercept more than a small fraction of the IR emission from that shadow zone.
So I would say that Lindzen is more likely to be correct than your “predictions from (y)our understanding of atmospheric physics.”
And Al gore’s eminent credentials as a climatologist are what ??
foinavon (12:34:29) :
Bruce Cobb (11:30:57) :
These are relevant issues aren’t they?
No, the only thing that’s relevant is the science. But you AGWers aren’t interested, preferring instead to go with the ad hominem argument and smear tactics, which prove absolutely nothing, except the emptiness of your argument.
The fact is, fonavon, your AGW ideology, which is based on nothing but pseudoscience is going down the tubes.
foinavon (16:10:53) :
The correctness/reliability/usefulness of a paper really starts to be assessed once it appears in the literature. It stands or falls in relation to subsequent research, analysis and publications.
Odd that you left ‘replication’ off that list… Is that why we have not gotten publication of the raw data and methodology of GISS ?
Simon,
You can address all the arguments here with word play for ever.
The point I was making, as I’m sure you’re aware, is that of turning over data and methods. You know this hasn’t been done, so why defend it? Why does McIntyre have to file a seemingly never ending stream of Freedom of Information Act requests and still not recieve data? Why aren’t Mann and Hansen required to release the methods they used to adjust data?
Sorry…I’m clearly not a scientist…but those actions don’t support scientific process, and do nothing but take away credibility.
You will always be able to single out specific responses on either side of this debate that are incorrect or inacurate. That is noise.
JimB
Not just the Antarctic warming…
Death rate of trees in the Northwestern U.S. has doubled in the past 17yrs due to Global Warming:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/01/22/study.forests.dying/index.html
Is it me being overly cynical, or have the frequency of these articles increased since the inauguration?
JimB
foinavon,
If you believe in Mann’s work, than you and him should move on up to Greenland, where the Vikings were able to live for several centuries. It is much warmer now than it was then, so raising enough food to support yourselves, should be no problem.
Let us know how that turns out. Don’t forget your sunscreen.
Foinavon,
Proxy studies are essentially statistical exercises requiring a high level of statistical expertise. Steve McEntyre at ClimateAudit is an expert at statistics, and his site is regularly visited by other experts in the field. I can only surmise from your support of Mann, et al. that you’ve never given more than a cursory perusal of ClimateAudit.
The article referenced in the above post is probably one of the worst pieces of journalism I think I’ve read.
It states that global warming is being blamed, it cites 50 years of data collection, but it never once explains what the data is, what the change in temps are that has brought about this cataclysmic change.
it is apparently a preview of an article to be published in Science.
JimB
foinavon says:
Lee Kington says:
I do think it is too strong to call Spencer and Christy’s satellite work “incompetent”. It is true that it was the first attempt to analyze the data and such first attempts often don’t get it right.
On the other hand, to call their errors “minor” is certainly not justified. For many years, their data seemed to suggest that the earth was cooling rather than warming, giving much cover to the point-of-view that the warming was an artifact…in fact, their study alone arguably might have been the single biggest piece of data that gave cover to delay action on global warming. As it turns out, they made several errors that mainly shifted the data in the cooling direction. (And, while it may be true to some degree that some part of the shift in the trend is due to a longer data record, you can use their current data to ascertain that even trends over considerably shorter periods starting at the beginning of the record have significant positive trends in the latest version of their data analysis.)
It is also worth noting that despite these errors, Spencer and Christy were thankfully never hauled before a Congressional committee like Mann and company were. And, this is true despite the fact that subsequent work by others has thus far changed the current understanding less in the case of Mann et al. than it has in the case of Spencer and Christy. Instead, the normal scientific course was allowed to proceed.
I’ll also defend Spencer by noting that he does seem to be working on publishing some of his recent analyses on cloud feedbacks and the like, so he is not strictly sticking to the web. On the other hand, while I will avoid harsh labels such as “incompetent”, some of the analyses he has posted on the web like his recent stuff on the origins of the CO2 rise have some frightfully glaring errors, as tamino and some of us commenters have been discussing on his blog.
“The researchers devised a statistical technique”
After reading through a pile of this kind of stuff yesterday, I finally realized exactly here all the statistician jobs that disappeared from the Tobacco Institute had ultimately reappeared.
“” foinavon (09:41:48) :
Flanagan (07:24:18) :
Yes it’s pretty dreary (a gift of $144 if registrants to the Heartland Institue pretend Climate “Science” meeting sign some petition devised by a tobacco company propagandist nearly 10 years ago). I wonder who they consider might be taken in by that!?
The list of cosponsers (click on the poster with the gallery of rogues on the Intro page of the meeting site) gives a pretty good indication of the purpose of this sort of “meeting” and perhaps helps to understand the dubious thinking that considers that dodgy petitions have anything to do with science…
http://www.heartland.org/events/NewYork09/newyork09.html
It should be a blast! “”
Well foinavon; they had one last year; and all the leading AGW advocates were invited to attend, and present papers. Tehy even invited AL Gore and invited him to give a paper, and even offered to pay his $200,000 talk fee.
Stangely to a man, all the AGW fans declined the invitation; which would also have been an opportunity for “Debate” to take place.
Gore refuses to debate, in fatc he refuses to appear anywhere unless the sponsors pay his fee , and agree to a rule that he will accept, and answer NO questions.
So just who are the scientists, and who are the shysters ?
But the oldest two tricks in the debating handbook, are first off, the straw man argument; which can often be countered by another strawman argument, and failing that; the next tool of weak debaters is the ad hominem attack.
We have quite a few weak debaters attend here, and attack the messenger; but we get very little counter argument to the messages. Is the AGW thesis so weak, that its supporters can’t defend it with simple data, such as data showing a rising (or falling) atmospheric CO2 concentration, accompanied by, or followed by a rising or falling global surface mean temperature.
So far, all they have been able to show us (An Inconvenient Truth pages 66/67) are instances where rising and falling global mean surface temperatures are followed by rising and falling atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
In our normal predictions from our understanding of atmospheric physics, we are used to the idea of having the cause happen before the effect, rather than the other way round. this quirk of human nature would lead us to conclude that it is rising and falling global mean surface temperatures (however caused) that give rise subsequently to rising and falling atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
I know it is just a small point; but it is what our understanding of atmospheric physics leads us to believe.
The UAH data is now reasonably in accord with other data (e.g. RSS)
hmmm………..
Should RSS correct their lower troposphere satellite data ?
http://www.warwickhughes.com/blog/?p=196
“Professor Brook said it had been thought Antarctica was cooling partly because of the hole in the ozone layer, which allowed the hot air out.”
Is this statement really true….Did this guy say that. I’m just a little ole’ engineer but aren’t there high pressure areas at the poles? Thus, is not the air mostly subsiding at the poles? If the air is subsiding..then how can the ozone layer let the hot air out? Just my two cents!
“The scientists estimate the level of uncertainty in the measurements is between 2-3 degrees Celsius.”
I do not know what this statement means. How does one estimate “uncertainty” and does it have anything to do with reproducibility or accuracy? Is this supposed to mean that a ground temperature measurement of “X” (with it’s inherent accuracy and reproducibility limitations) can be “estimated” by satellite observation to within +/- 2-3C of “X” 95% of the time? But the satellite temperature estimate is derived from a large area, not a discrete point. So does measuring apples and estimating oranges fall together within +/- 2-3C most of the time? Is that what this means?
“The scientists found temperature measurements from weather stations corresponded closely with satellite data for overlapping time periods.”
Again, I do not know what “overlapping time periods” means. Does this mean “time averaging” of the ground temperature measurements? What does “corresponded closely” mean? Are these same day determinations? Sounds to me like there is a whole lot of estimating going on.
And then by using this data, the authors arrived at an “estimated trend” at the level of 0.1C. And yet the prime data has an “estimated” 2-3C uncertainty.
How was this “study” ever published in a scientific journal? And even worse, why is anyone even paying any attention to it? In my “estimation” this is not science.
Steve Hempell: The graphs of AHU MSU data I’ve been providing are only for reference. I haven’t said they were used in the study.
There doesn’t appear to be an easy way to download long term AVHRR data.
http://wdc.dlr.de/sensors/avhrr3/
And then it occurred to me: Once I got it, what would I do with it? Steig et al went through processes that would be difficult if not impossible to reproduce.
Regards