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.”
Here is the sequence of posts on Viking burials in Greenland’s permafrost:
1– evanjones: “And just about everywhere where they were capable of writing about it, the MWP existed. Is it therefore reasonable to presume that everywhere where there was no writing the MWP did not exist?”
2– Joel Shore quoted (1) and commented: “Even if we took your claim here on the historical record to be true (which I don’t without some real evidence to back it up), that still wouldn’t address the issue of whether the warm periods were synchronous or asynchronous.”
Comment on #2: In the initial phrase above, Joel Shore was expressing dubiousness about the MWP in the North Atlantic, the region “where they were capable of writing about it.” Has was saying that he wanted something stronger than anecdotal evidence.
3—I, Roger Knights, quoted (2 (but not 1)) and commented: “How about Greenland burials beneath today’s permafrost?”
Comment on #3: In other words, I was supplying hard evidence to back up the historical record of the MWP in the North Atlantic, which Shore had bridled at.
4– Joel Shore quoted (3 (but not 1 or 2)) and commented: “Again, the North Atlantic is the region that we know had a pronounced MWP. However, the evidence that this happened elsewhere at the same time is not there.”
Comment on #4: This is an evasion (first sentence) and diversion (second sentence). Tsk tsk. As to the substance of the second sentence, see here:
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton/what_hockey_stick.html
Pages 16-29 summarize eleven scientific papers that provide evidence of warming elsewhere on the planet during the MWP (along with ten papers dealing with Europe and the North Atlantic). Each summary occupies about half a page and contains a graph that illustrates key data points.
Oops–Change “Has was saying” to “He was saying”.
I don’t know how you could read my comment as being specific to the MWP in the North Atlantic region. First of all, I was responding to evanjones’s comment (which I quoted in directly above what the part of my post that you quoted) that was clearly directed at the idea that the historical evidence showed the MWP to be worldwide:
Do you think “where they were capable of writing about it” would restrict one to the North Atlantic region?!?! Is that the only place that you believe they had a written language in the Medieval times?
Second of all, it makes no sense to ask whether the MWP in one particular place was synchronous or asynchronous with itself!
What I was saying is that it may or may not be true that there was a warm period sometime during the middle ages in many parts of the world (or northern hemisphere) but that I needed more than an unsupported assertion before I would believe it and, furthermore, that this would still not address the issue of whether these warm periods occurred simultaneously or not. The Medieval period is quite a broad period of time and one of the major points of the work of Mann et al is that the maximum warmth tended to occur in different areas at different times during that period so that the Northern Hemisphere temperature shows just a broad bump rather than a sharper peak during that time.
I’ll take a look at the Monckton paper but I would be surprised if he actually dealt with the second point (the synchronicity issue). And, of course, that work is again a very one-sided presentation for an advocacy group and is not a peer-reviewed paper…or even a paper authored by somebody with any sort of decent publication record in the peer-reviewed literature. Hence, there is no reason to believe his presentation is anything but a one-sided view of the issue. I wonder how people on this blog would react if we started linking to the Greenpeace or Sierra Club websites to provide scientific or historical evidence!
Roger Knight’s link (@04:08:53) should be required reading in schools along with the mandatory viewing of Al Gore’s science fiction classic, AIT.
Anyone reading that PDF and still not accepting the fact of the MWP has a major reading comprehension problem, and they deserve our sympathy. Please think of the children!
Smokey (09:22:37) :
Smokey, have you ever thought about the tens of millions of African children who have died because of the junk science banning of DDT?
I didn’t make myself clear enough, Advenice24. AIT is already mandatory viewing – I was suggesting a counterweight to it.
Roger Sowell (18:25:18) :
Our measurements showed zero, down to the most sensitive instruments we could use. We then did a flame ionization test, and sure enough, there was a characteristic yellow color that indicated salt was present.
Roger, your example illustrates my point… Your instrument error masked the quantity that was really there. You had measured 0.0000 +/- [something] and the actual quantity was hidden in the error bands. If you asserted that 0.000000000 precision could be calculated and there was nothing there, then you would be making the error GISS is making.
You didn’t make that error. You went to a test with far finer sensitivity and an atomic answer (it’s yellow or it isn’t). Then treated the problem. What was the real quantity present? Was it 0.00000001 or 0.00000002 ? You could not know because it was lost in the error band of your instrument.
Similarly, we can’t know the ‘average temperature’ to +/- 0.1C when our error band is +/- 0.5C and at best we could state that the ‘average temperature’ had a change of -0.4C to +0.6C based on the data.
The only exception to this that I know of is oversampling where you sample a periodic event far more times than the Nyquist limit and can get a reasonable reconstruction of the waveform with more, but less precision, samples. Since each day is a discreet instance of a 24 hour cycle, I don’t see any oversampling of a frequency here…
Advenice24 says:
Ah yes, the DDT ban myth. See http://info-pollution.com/ddtban.htm and http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/ddt/
Joel Shore (12:45:50) :
Ah yes, Deltoid. Where they have ad hominy grits for breakfast.
Here’s a differing view from a bunch of oil shills and right-wing reactionaries.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6083944
John M,
I think that story actually confirms several of my basic points:
(1) There has never been a worldwide ban on malaria. That articles talks about a change from “approv[ing] DDT for dealing with malaria” to “actively support[ing] it.” Some people thought that the announcement amounted to even less of a change in policy than that and was mainly a publicity stunt by Arata Kochi.
(2) Major environmental groups support the use of DDT for malaria prevention: “A number of major environmental groups support the limited use of DDT, such as spraying only inside of houses and huts once or twice a year. That type of use is supported by the Sierra Club and Environmental Defense, which was originally founded by scientists concerned about DDT.”
(3) The evolution of resistance to pesticides (and drugs) has been a big problem in fighting malaria, as the last paragraph of that story notes. It is unfortunate that they didn’t focus on this more. In fact, one of the links that I gave you references an article that discusses the fact that the skyrocketing in malaria deaths that occurred in India in the 1970s happened simultaneously with the continued rapid increase of the use of DDT (mainly for agriculture, which used the lion’ share of it). In fact, if Carson’s warnings about resistance to these pesticides had been heeded, and pesticides like DDT were reserved for fighting disease rather than sprayed willy-nilly for agriculture, it is likely that DDT could have remained more effective.
Joel Shore (16:35:55) :
Thanks Joel. I’m happy to hear you’re for the limited and controlled use of DDT to control malaria. Perhaps this sentence in the NPR article is pertinent to the discussion.
Also, I’m not sure of the bona fides of this site (lots of straight news on the home page), but this is a pretty clear statement.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/african-nations-lift-ddt-ban-to-fight-malaria/2006/05/30/1148956344979.html
Can I assume you oppose pressuring developing countries to impose harsh limits on insecticides they think they need?
http://www.newvision.co.ug/D/8/20/669232
John M (17:20:50) :
Joel Shore (16:35:55) :
Thanks Joel. I’m happy to hear you’re for the limited and controlled use of DDT to control malaria. Perhaps this sentence in the NPR article is pertinent to the discussion.
In the early 1960s, several developing countries had nearly wiped out malaria. After they stopped using DDT, malaria came raging back and other control methods have had only modest success.
Malaria was already coming back before the end of DDT use because of the development of resistance to DDT in the mosquito population. That was the reason that other strategies had to be employed.
Subsequently DDT was approved for vector control only rather than its previous indiscriminate use in agriculture, an approach which led to less resistance development.
Check out the Stockholm Convention.
The biggest problem by far with the use of DDT is indiscriminate overuse, which results in resistance to its effect. When I was a boy I remember a dairy farmer telling my father that when he first used DDT the dead flies were so numerous that they used snow shovels to clean up the carcasses.
It is human nature to overuse anything beneficial, like DDT or antibiotics, for instance. Education is necessary.
But the pendulum had swung so far in the other direction that lots of people died unnecessarily. And the ban, while not total, still covers most countries; where in the U.S., for example, can you buy DDT?
There is still no insecticide as effective as DDT for controlling malaria. And the biggest [emotional] reason for its ban was the claim that it made birds’ eggshells so thin that the eggs were crushed by the hens has been falsified. The fact that the DDT ban has led to a massive death toll from malaria isn’t as important to some “environmentalists” as bird eggs. Widespread, judicious use of DDT will again start to save lives. That’s a good thing, isn’t it?
Sounds like we may lurching toward violent agreement on DDT (pending any comments still in moderation).
It’s just as well, since we’ve strayed pretty far OT.
This is in response to Joel Shore’s post that contained the following key phrases:
Roger Knights says:
“How about … medieval and Roman artifacts coming to light in the wake of retreating alpine glaciers?”
You mean like this paper http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/114125034/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0 regarding a pass in the Swiss Alps whose abstract reads:
“During the hot summer of 2003, reduction of an ice field in the Swiss Alps (Schnidejoch) uncovered spectacular archaeological hunting gear, … The preservation of Neolithic leather indicates permanent ice cover at that site from ca. 4900 cal. yr BP until AD 2003, implying that the ice cover was smaller in 2003 than at any time during the last 5000 years. Current glacier retreat is unprecedented since at least that time. This is highly significant regarding the interpretation of the recent warming and the rapid loss of ice in the Alps.”
It seems to me that the authors of the paper’s abstract may be mistaken in thinking that “The preservation of Neolithic leather indicates permanent ice cover at that site.” Mightn’t leather survive without an ice cover? And how did all those artifacts from other eras get under the ice?
Anyway, here is a quotation I’ve plucked from the 1/29 thread titled “Mature Arctic Ivory Gull Seen in Massachusetts – first time in over a century”. It interprets the data from that site in what seems to me to be a more reasonable way. Is this matter of multiple glacier retreats vs. no-retreats considered settled by archaeologists, or is there still debate about it?
Harold Ambler (13:41:57) :
What follows is an excerpt from Nigel Calder and Henrik Svensmark’s “The Chilling Stars”:
The archaeologists of Bern Canton were grateful when Ursula Leuenberger presented them with an archer’s quiver made of birch bark. They were amazed when radiocarbon dating showed the quiver to be 4,700 years old. Frau Leuenberger had picked it up while walking with her husband in the mountains above Thun. There, the perennial ice in the Schnidejoch had retreated in the unusually hot summer of 2003, revealing the relic hidden beneath it.
The hiking couple had unwittingly rediscovered a long forgotten short-cut for travellers and traders across the barrier of the Swiss Alps. To keep treasure-hunters away, the find remained a secret for two years while archaeologists scoured the area of the melt-back and analysed the finds. By the end of 2005 they had some 300 items – from the Neolithic Era, the Bronze Age, the Roman period and medieval times.
The various ages of the items clustered in intervals when the pass of Schnidejoch was open, offering a quick route to and from the Rhone valley south of the mountains. There were no substantial human remains to compare with the murdered Ötztal ‘ice man’, found with a similar quiver high in the Italian Tyrol in 1991 and dated to 3300 BC. But the emergent history of repeated openings and closures of Schnidejoch gave a far more interesting picture of climate change.
The Ötztal man is a prize exhibit for those who assert that the climate at the start of the 21st century is alarmingly warm. The ice that preserved his mummified corpse lay unmelted, 3,250 metres above sea level, for more than 5,000 years – since the world was in its warmest phase following the most recent ice age. Then, so the story goes, the manmade global warming of the industrial era outstripped all natural variations and released the body as a warning to us all.
Quite different is the impression given by the relics found in the pass of Schnidejoch, at an altitude 500 metres lower than the Ötztal man’s ice-tomb. They tell of repeated alternations between warm periods when the pass was useable and cold periods when it was shut by the ice. The discoveries also cleared up a long-standing mystery about a Roman lodging house found on the slopes above the present-day town of Thun, where there was a Roman temple and settlement. The head of the cantonal archaeological service, Peter Suter, explained his satisfaction at the outcome: ‘We always asked ourselves why the lodging house was there. Now we know that it was on the route leading across the Schnidejoch.’
=======================
“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.”
Busted.
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=5054
The “other” Harry data is derived from Gill. I’d figured this out yesterday when I wrote the teaser – a CA reader also figured this out for 1987-1989 this morning. But it’s not just 1987-1989; it’s 1987-1993 and 1997-1998. Also the “old” Harry was actually “Gill”. The graphic below compares READER/GISS New Harry with original Gill. Values are identical from 1987 to July 1994 and in 1997-1998. Values are different from Dec 1994 to Dec 1996 and for 1999-2000 where “Harry” has been spliced in the READER/GISS version.
Gill is located on the Ross Ice Shelf at 79.92S 178.59W 25M and is completely unrelated to Harry.
NOW THE WORLDWIDE PRESS IS SWARMING,
‘ROUND ANOTHER
FINE EXAMPLE OF MANN-MADE GLOBAL WARMING!
JUST LIKE THE FAMOUS HOCKEY STICK,
THEY USED THE OLD
“SPLICE TOGETHER TWO DATASETS” TRICK.
********************
Text below is from
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=5054
Ross McKitrick:
February 2nd, 2009 at 1:38 pm
Steve, nice work. If I have the story correctly, it goes like this.
– The area of principle interest in the Steig et al analysis is West Antarctic, where they report a newly-discovered warming trend attributable, in part, to Mann’s clever ability to calibrate temperature to something-other-than-temperature and thereby reconstruct the non-existent temperature data.
– Within that region Steig introduces data from 4 Automated Weather Stations, and the AWS with the big trend is called Harry.
– In exploring the Harry data you compared the current GISS version (which Steig used) against one you downloaded in [SM: early] 2008. I gather that the 2008 [SM- current] GISS version equals the version in the READER [SM: Feb 1, 2009] archive. You noticed that the 2 are different, with the newer version showing large positive divergences in 1995-1997 and 1999-2003 (approx.) These divergences are very large, 5-15 C.
– In the Wisconsin temperature archive the Harry station is listed at a different location than Steig reported. However the Wisconsin and Steig Harry data are identical in the overlap years.
– After searching through the other Wisconsin records you found that the old Harry series (archived on GISS as of 2008) was identical to the data from another station called Gill. The Gill station is located somewhere else entirely.
– It turns out that new Harry–as used by Steig–is a splice of Gill and some relatively recent Harry data.
– The recent Harry data as recorded at Wisconsin is for years 1994-96, 1999-2000. There are also Harry data for years 2001-2004 (it looks like) in your first figure, which are from GISS 2009. Are these data also from the same station that contributed the Wisc data? [SM – data ends in 2002. Haven’t checked 2001-2002 yet. Wisc online archive doesnt have 2001-2002 information, but it seems to be incomplete].
– The immediate questions of interest are: Are other Antarctic series in Steig similarly fouled up? [SM – Dunno] and, What happens to their results if new Harry is either deleted or replaced with a West Antarctic station that is not a splice of 2 unrelated sites, if such a series is available? The other question is whether bristlecone pines grow in West Antarctica: it sounds like they do, metaphorically at least.
Antarctica warming? An evolution of viewpoint
NO ANTANTICA WARMING, NO EVOLUTION OF VIEWPOINT, JUST ANOTHER CASE OF BS
(BAD SCIENCE)
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/going_cold_on_antarctic_warming#48360