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.”
How boringly predictable, every summer we have the same alarmist “all the ice is melting” BS. Every September in the North and January/February in the south.
However this year is different. This year they are deducing the data. So the raw data is NOT showing any meaningful or significant rise in temps? Could that be why there is MORE ice there than last year?
Mind you, the AGW alarmists have never let what is actually happening get in the way of their alarmism, have they?
The Australian Government and its cohort of green supporters will grasp this ‘scientific’ knowledge with both hands as the wheels appear to be falling off the proposed emissions trading scheme, not necessarily because of global cooling facts but people are nervous about jobs due to the global finacial meltdown. I just hope that one of politicians sees the threat of global cooling as a get out of gaol card for the stupid emissions trading scheme that will have no impact on the worlds emissions even if they were causing a problem, afterall Australia produces less than 1.5% of the worlds CO2 and its percentage is falling due to the growth of China and India.
Real Climate have an article from co-authors of the report, gives some extra details.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/01/state-of-antarctica-red-or-blue/
I find this bit interesting,
“In our own published work to date (Schneider and Steig, PNAS), we find that the 1940s [edit for clarity: the 1935-1945 decade] were the warmest decade of the 20th century in West Antarctica, due to an exceptionally large warming of the tropical Pacific at that time.”
So if west antartica was warmer 60/70 years ago how would the trend look if we started it 70 years ago and not 50 years ago?
“Our results do not contradict earlier studies suggesting that some regions of Antarctica have cooled. Why? Because those studies were based on shorter records (20-30 years, not 50 years) and because the cooling is limited to the East Antarctic. Our results show this too, as is readily apparent by comparing our results for the full 50 years (1957-2006) with those for 1969-2000 (the dates used in various previous studies), below.”
So if there has been less warming or even cooling for the last 20-30 years, but is this not the time when CO2 concentratons were higher?
It all sounds like weather to me.
The BBC are all over this story http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7843186.stm
Hows this for drama:”A BAS team currently on site is reporting that the Wilkins shelf, about 15,000 sq km in area, is probably about to break free.
“It really could go at any minute, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the final cracks started to appear very soon,” said BAS’s David Vaughan.”
Another Antarctic Scare Story
Kath (23:27:30) quotes in part: “Reviewers suggested that his results were dangerous to humanity.”
This beggars belief. Have we really sunk so low that science may be corrupted at will by thought control wild-eyers?
“…data analyses that were failing to show net warming over the past century.”
Was his data analyses correct or incorrect? Who cares? That’s not the point. He was apparently propping up the sky…
Slash (and burn).
What a sad time we are living in.
Don’t miss the really good bits from this story… strike fear into your heart…
“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.”
“Scientists now estimate the melting of Antarctica’s massive ice sheets will cause the world’s sea levels to rise by one to two metres by the end of the century.”
Southern ice cap victim of global warming
Anthony: I’m going to try to post on the Antarctic TLT sometime today or tomorrow as part of the series I was doing on the effects of ENSO and volcanic eruptions on TLT. Here are a few preview graphs of Antarctic temperatures from that future post.
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The following are graphs of Antarctic and Southern Ocean TLT [AHU MSU] created from data available through the KNMI Climate Explorer Website. Keep in mind that the MSU satellite data does not reach the entire Antarctic, which is something I found curious about the use of satellite data for the University of Washington study. (They must be supplementing the sparse surface measurements with it.) In fact, RSS only lists data as far South as 70S. AHU extrapolates, smoothes, estimates, whatever, to provide data for the rest of the Antarctic. Regardless, here are additional graphs of the AHU TLT data for the Antarctic to add to the ones I put up yesterday for those discussing the Antarctic off-topic on the previous thread.
Here are the East and West TLT anomalies from 90S to 60S with linear trends. The trend in the west is flat, and the trend in the east is toward cooling:
http://i39.tinypic.com/9hqeeh.jpg
The Southern Ocean would influence that data so I reduced the longitudes in the following to 90S to 70S. Again, this is apparently data that’s estimated by AHU because it’s outside the reach of the MSU satellite as far as I know. Finally, a dataset with a warming trend:
http://i42.tinypic.com/b69i6e.jpg
You’d have to segment the data looking hard for an area that’s warming differently that the rest of the continent in order to come up with one that’s more significant.
There’s a phenomenon that effects Antarctic sea ice called the Antarctic sea ice dipole, which has ENSO as one of its primary influences, so I decided to take a look at the Antarctic TLT dipole, which I calculated as Western TLT MINUS Eastern TLT for 90S to 70S and compared it to scaled NINO3.4 SST anomalies. There’s some very apparent ENSO influence and at times it’s hard to tell what drives what. Curious.
http://i41.tinypic.com/2lunv5.jpg
O.K. so a paper is produced and published which “finds” warming in East Antarctica.
The paper depends upon no new observations (no new data). It depends upon an examination of existing data and satellite data but uses a different analytical method.
So why aren’t the experts lining up to produce similar papers on similar data which show how this one is wrong?
“People were calculating with their heads instead of actually doing the math,”
A claim I find extremely unlikely…..
What is a simple layman to make of all this?
Well, I notice that 3 of the 5 coauthors in this study (Rutherford, Mann, & Shindell) were also cited in the Wegman Report to Congress as being part of the social network involved in the infamous first hockey stick. Shindell (GISS) took part in the Nature teleconference; was he there to make sure all public pronouncements remained on message and that the proper spin was included?
And just as the hockey stick helped get rid of that inconvenient Medieval Warming Period (MWP), this new ‘research’ has managed to warm West Antarctica enough to overcome the cooling in East Antarctica so that the report can claim that on average the whole continent is warming. And just how were they able to pull off this feat? They devised {created; made up} a statistical technique {did they run it by a statistician to ensure their statistical approach was valid, since none of the coauthors is a statistician} to make a new estimate {so they don’t know what the temperatures were; they just came up with a guess that just happens to match their belief system}. Will this end up as yet another project for Steve McIntyre to examine the statistics used?
So is this the way modern ‘science’ works? Come up with a belief, then look for data that supports the belief while ignoring data that doesn’t conform? I think I’ll self-snip myself here before I let loose my frustrations on this latest display…
This is total drivel
There is no evidence for increased temepratures in the Antarctica:
http://www.physorg.com/news148239677.html
and
http://data.aad.gov.au/aadc/soe/display_indicator.cfm?soe_id=1
(scroll down to the graphs)
The AGW hypothesis and modelling predicts warming at high latitudes and very little at the equator, due to the presence of atmospheric water vapour. It was always the failure of the Antarctica to warm, as well as the failure of temperatures to increase in line with atmospheric CO2 over the last 10 years, that left the warming hysterics without any case. They are trying desperatly to manufacture one.
Here are the graphs I posted as part of the off-topic comments on yesterday’s thread.
Has the Antarctic warmed? Yes. Has it warmed in recent years? No. Unless you use surface temperature data, then you have a rise in recent years.
Lower troposphere temperature:
http://i39.tinypic.com/2d0i2hu.jpg
A blurb from my post on Surface Temperature By Continent. Did they cherry-pick the start date for the study? Scroll down for the Antarctic:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/01/land-surface-temperature-comparison-by_07.html
It included a comparative graph of GISS, CRUTEM, and NCDC data for the Antarctic:
http://i39.tinypic.com/33nkxfc.jpg
And the capper that seems to contradict their claim that the recent Antarctic cooling is a result of the change in ozone, blah, blah. How did man vary ozone in the early period of this graph to cause that drop in SST anomalies from 1880 to 1920? The peak in the 1980s/90s didn’t come close to reaching the SSTs at the end of the 19th century.
http://i44.tinypic.com/2uen29u.jpg
One of the authors of the Nature paper, Eric Steig, made an appearance at Lucia’s website and had a discussion with Roger Pielke Jr that’s worth reading. I, of course, had to throw a few graphs into the conversation.
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2008/who-expects-a-tropical-tropospheric-hot-spot-from-any-and-all-sources-of-warming/#comments
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And for those interested in the TLT of the Antarctic Peninsula, here’s a graph of it compared to scaled NINO3.4 SST anomalies and to Sato Index data. The anomalous dip in 1986 appears to be the cause of the positive trend in Antarctic Peninsula Lower Troposphere Temperature.
http://i41.tinypic.com/rt43ns.jpg
I should be posting the rest of the Antarctic data in a day or two at my website.
Matty from Perth Summed it up –
By the time this is shot down they will have the headlines they wanted.
In today’s Australian Media Alarmist Professor Barry Brook has been having a field day.
We have done our best to deal with this hysterical alarmism, but its all over the Australian TV News this evening-
See the Agmates post here.
What is the scale on the 2009 image?
Smoke and Mirrors
If Mann is involved in this, I’d put it straight in the trash.
Is the Wilkins Ice Sheet, which is mentioned recently by this Reuters report, in the region that should be affected by the volcanic activity? What about the reports of ice in Antartica growing by 20% in the past story about solar albeido?
http://gmy.news.yahoo.com/v/11649825
As south america is divided in two different climates, separated by the Andes, also Antartica has two climates areas, as you say. I have observed that these issues conveniently appear during SH summer. Warmers will produce similar “papers” during NH next summer.
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.
You are hypothesising that surface warming of Antarctica over the last 50 years might be significantly attributed to volcanic activity? That’s an interesting idea. Do you, or does anyone, have any figures to support such a notion?
The recent discovery you refer to was of a sub-ice volcano that erupted 2,000 years ago. Whatever its current level of activity and the extent to which that may continue to effect ice sheet flow, it’s somewhat hard to imagine the extent to which you think that might be affecting surface temperatures.
Does your hypothesis of volcanic activity as a driver of warming apply equivalently to other continents?
Looks like they were looking for warming, got creative with the data, and well, what do you know, they “found” warming. That’s it? They needed a “last hurrah” and this is the best they could come up with? Pathetic. Funny thing is, even if they did manage to “prove” overall warming in the antarctic the past 50 years, all they’ve proven is the climate changed (maybe). Yes, we know. Now, please show us how man caused it.
OT
I just read that Intel will be closing their wafer production in Santa Clara, Calif. and Williams-Sonoma of San Francisco will be cutting 1400 jobs.
Soon, Hollwood wil be the last industries in California and all the “Stars” will be on the government payroll. I wonder if they could live on $100,000.00 IOU’s per year.
A true disaster in the making with one to two metre sea rises and you will have to abandon your houses as well according to Professor Barry Bock, Director of the University of Adelaide’s Research Institute of Climate Change and Sustainability. [ Australia ]
The good Professor also has a reason for the cooling of the Antarctic as well!
“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.”
I kid you not! Check for yourself!
“The Australian” 22 / Jan / 2009
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24946666-11949,00.html
For the known argentinian geologist Miguel Gonzales, in his studies in the “Salinas del bebedero”, a salt lake in Argentina, http://www.springerlink.com/content/m11m129238u61484/ all these weather changes coincide with solar minimums like the Maunder minimum, which produced drought in the argentinian “pampa” (plains), and which it is happening again now. So, in general, we have different weather systems: one west of the andes and the other east of the andes.
There’s a partisan story on Bloomberg here:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601124&sid=a88Ja2tPfcnM&refer=home
Here are the headline plus selected paragraphs of spin:
Antarctic Warming Found by Scientists Dashes Argument (Update1)
By Alex Morales
Jan. 22 (Bloomberg) — Antarctica has warmed over the past half-century, scientists said, dashing a key argument by skeptics who say climate change is overstated.
Temperatures rose an average 0.12 degrees Celsius (0.22 Fahrenheit) per decade since 1957, researchers led by Eric Steig, a professor of glaciology at the University of Washington in Seattle, said in the journal Nature. Using new measurement methods, they discovered warming in the continent’s interior, which United Nations-sponsored scientists theorized was cooling.
The findings may help puncture arguments by global-warming skeptics such as the late author Michael Crichton who have pointed to cooling in parts of Antarctica as an indicator that climate change is exaggerated.
“This has put the last pieces of the jigsaw in place,” Gareth Marshall, a British Antarctic Survey climatologist in Cambridge who wasn’t involved in the research, said yesterday in a telephone interview. “If you consider Antarctica as a whole, it shows a significant warming.”
………….
Ice Shelves Breaking
The study indicates that the breakup of ice shelves already seen in the Antarctic Peninsula, a spit of land reaching toward South America, may “eventually” extend to other parts of the continent, Steig said in a telephone interview.
“The fact that the warming that is appearing on the peninsula extends way down into West Antarctica would suggest that eventually, if that trend continues, ice shelves in West Antarctica are also going to similarly be affected,” Steig said, pointing to a timeframe of “hundreds of years.”
…………..
Most ground-based temperature measurements from Antarctica began in 1957, and the data is largely from coastal areas. Gauging the vast interior by satellite didn’t begin until 1979. Steig’s team used mathematical models to establish the relationship between the ground and satellite measurements between 1979 and 2006 and then used the correlation they found to calculate temperatures for the interior going back to 1957.
…………….
Over the past 50 years the Antarctic Peninsula warmed an average of 0.11 degrees Celsius a decade, West Antarctica gained 0.17 degrees every 10 years and temperatures in East Antarctica rose by 0.1 degrees, Steig’s team found. The data from the east had a margin of error of 0.07 degrees, meaning the actual warming may be close to zero.
Even so, East Antarctica has cooled by about 0.2 degrees Celsius a decade since the 1970s, the researcher said.
“The warming prior to that was even greater than the cooling since and therefore, on average, it’s warming,” Steig said. The recent cooling has been attributed to the hole in the ozone layer caused by pollutants that are now banned so the cooling is likely to reverse in coming years, he said.
‘Huge Gap’ Filled
“Normally when ozone is warmed up by the sun, it causes the stratosphere, which is part of the atmosphere, to warm,” the British Antarctic Survey’s Marshall said. “If the ozone is missing, then that part of the atmosphere will cool and therefore you get this colder air over Antarctica and this propagates downwards toward the surface.”
Because of the statistical uncertainty that still surrounds the data from East Antarctica, Steig said his team’s biggest advance was in establishing there’s a clear warming trend in West Antarctica.
“The magnitude of the trend is larger in West Antarctica so we’re more confident that it’s warming,” Steig said. “We’ve really filled in a huge gap.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Alex Morales in London at amorales2@bloomberg.net.
Update on scale – the original figure at NASA has it here
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/305938main_Antarctica_temps.jpg
The figure in 2004 shows a cooling of 0.2C per year (2C per decade) in the heart of the Antartic Continent. Now we are to believe a warming of 0.1C per decade in the same place – quite a turnaround in view.
Again, per my comment previously….JUNK
Anthony – You have presented us with two pictures, one labeled “NASA’s viewpoint – 2009” and the other labeled “NASA’s viewpoint – 2004”. They both show temperature trends but are you sure they show the trends over the same time period?
One of the points of this paper is that there are some places in Antarctica seem to have shown cooling over the last 20 or 30 years but appear to show warming over a longer (50 year) time period. And, this is in line with the idea that there might be a different countervailing forces operating…namely a general warming trend like the global trend but then also a cooling effect caused by a change in wind patterns due to ozone depletion (which only became significant around the late 1970s). Of course, this is still a rather speculative hypothesis. This piece discusses all of this more: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/01/state-of-antarctica-red-or-blue
From RealNonsense.org last Feb.:
“Despite the recent announcement that the discharge from some Antarctic glaciers is accelerating, we often hear people remarking that parts of Antarctica are getting colder, and indeed the ice pack in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica has actually been getting bigger. Doesn’t this contradict the calculations that greenhouse gases are warming the globe? Not at all, because a cold Antarctica is just what calculations predict… and have predicted for the past quarter century.”
So, I guess this means they’ll be changing their tune now to “a warming Antarctica is just what calculations predict…. and have predicted for the past quarter century”. AGW Believers hoisted by their own petard. Once again.