UPDATE 1/25: Mr. Hays has has provided a follow up letter, posted at the bottom of this article. – Anthony
This letter below, reprinted with permission, is from Ross Hays. Ross was a CNN meteorologist for many years. He works for NASA at the Columbia Balloon Facility.
In that capacity he has spent much time in Antarctica. He obviously can’t speak for his agency but can have an opinion which he shared with several people. It is printed below in entirety, exactly as he sent it to Eric Steig today, the lead author of the University of Washington paper highlighted in a press release yesterday that claims there is a warming in Antarctica. There were some of the pronouncements made in the media, particularly to the Associated Press by Dr. Michael Mann, that marry that paper with “global warming”, even though no such claim was made in the press release about the scientific paper itself.
I agree with Ross Hays. In my opinion, this press release and subsequent media interviews were done for media attention. The timing is suspicious, with the upcoming Al Gore’s address to congress, he can now say: “We’ve now learned Antarctica is warming”. A Google News search shows about 530 articles on the UW press release in various media.
I ask my readers that share this opinion to consider writing factual letters to the editor (in your own words) or make online comments if any of these media outlets are near you. – Anthony
letter dated 1/22/09
Eric,
Let me first say that this is my own opinion and does not represent the agency I work for. I feel your study is absolutely wrong.
There are very few stations in Antarctica to begin with and only a hand full with 50 years of data. Satellite data is just approaching thirty years of available information. In my experience as a day to day forecaster that has to travel and do field work in Antarctica the summer seasons have been getting colder. In the late 1980s helicopters were used to take our personnel to Williams Field from McMurdo Station due to the annual receding of the Ross Ice Shelf, but in the past few years the thaw has been limited and vehicles can continue to make the transition and drive on the ice. One climate note to pass along is December 2006 was the coldest December ever for McMurdo Station. In a synoptic perspective the cooler sea surface temperatures have kept the maritime storms farther offshore in the summer season and the colder more dense air has rolled from the South Pole to the ice shelf.
There was a paper presented at the AMS Conference in New Orleans last year noting over 70% of the continent was cooling due to the ozone hole. We launch balloons into the stratosphere and the anticyclone that develops over the South Pole has been displaced and slow to establish itself over the past five seasons. The pattern in the troposphere has reflected this trend with more maritime (warmer) air around the Antarctic Peninsula which is also where most of the automated weather stations are located for West Antarctica which will give you the average warmer readings and skew the data for all of West Antarctica.
With statistics you can make numbers go to almost any conclusion you want. It saddens me to see members of the scientific community do this for media coverage.
Sincerely,
Ross Hays
Follow up letter, sent 1/24 and posted on 1/25 with permission:
Anthony,
A prerequisite to going to work for the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility was to pass an Antarctic physical. During the southern summer each year CSBF launches large (up to 40 million cubic feet) scientific balloons that orbit Antarctica for up to 42 days with scientific experiments. Most of the payloads are astrophysics, but scientific balloons discovered the ozone hole over Antarctica.
The meteorologist job is to do daily forecasts for our launch site at Williams Field near McMurodo Station on Ross Island. When campaigns are going on daily briefings are provided to personnel and a written summary is provided for daily situation reports sent to the Balloon Program Office at Goddard Space Center. We also monitor the stratospheric winds while the payloads are being readied to launch and to make sure the winds are in the correct direction and the balloon will stay over the continent. We also forecast payload termination and impact areas.
I have only done two tours on the Ice but have provided forecasts from Palestine, Texas on the years between after the balloon launches we take over forecasts for the payload and handle termination from our command center. I will be returning to the Ice in November.
My main problem with the study is the data sets. I know of only 4 stations for all of Antarctica that have fifty complete years of data. I am trying to find the exact number now. Most stations have been on and off in operation for a few seasons during field experiments. One of our retired meteorologists, Glenn Rosenberger was a US Navy meteorologist that did tours in Antarctica. He helped install the first automated weather stations on the continent: In conjunction with Stanford University, believe it was in 1978-1979 that 4 were put on the ice. One was on Minna Bluff, one on the Plateau, one on the slope of Eribus. They were powered by the RTG (radiological thermoelectric generators) and the I was the Radiological Officer for the command. There is just not enough data to support the results in my opinion.
The discussion about the warming in West Antarctica is also questionable to me since the majority of stations with several years of data are on the Antarctic Peninsula, which is surround by warmer maritime air, and doesn’t give a good balance over the interior.
I hope this gives you some idea about me.
Sincerely,
Ross Hays
For the second time in a week I’m in agreement with you! I’m sure things will be back to normal soon 😉
Neil Jones, in addition to Anthony’s answer I would add that cell phone technology has only really expanded world-wide in the last 10 – 15 years, therefore if your theory was correct, then one would expect to see warming occurring more recently and it would be accelerating. The earth has been in a cooling trend for the last 3 or four years, and has not warmed at all since 1998, so on that basis alone, I would refute that theory.
My God! Anthony might have found the problem – Microwave Ovens! Add that to CO2, Cow Farts and several other items accused of being the cause of predicted global warming and the Goreites have another suspect to add to their list of climate ‘enemies’.
A gorey truth about timing of iconic Antarctic warming and carbon trading dynamics. Broker buys 6000 carbon credits from pig farmer in the Phillipines paying $2 per tonne, ie $12,000 per year to install biogas unit (for pig shit). Broker sells credits to special investment bank at $10 per tonne. Bank sells carbon credits to industrial company faced with carbon cap and facing cost of emission reduction at $25-50 per tonne. Company happy to pay ban $15 per tonne. (Figures with the help of Jonathan Leake in a Sunday Times article).
Generation Investment Management is specialist carbon bank. CEO? Al Gore. Directors? Ex-Goldman Sachs. Founded several years ago, before the ‘Inconvenient Truth’ was released – but this particular inconvenient truth was not disclosed.
Thought for the day. Might be worth asking the many players to disclose and declare interests – a common practice in our own parliament back here on the motherboard!
I’m not certain how much longer Americans can afford to be spectators of their political and government betters. This site and Climate Audit are not spectating, but have planted a banner at which to rally. Enough of us have rallied at these banners, now we need to plant a new banner closer to the front.
Jim G (22:22:22) :
The trend for sea ice extent trend is clearly growing for the last 20 years.
Do you really think it would be growing if it were getting warmer?
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.anom.south.jpg
The anomoly for 2008 was almost 2 million km^2.
Would this also be a sign of warming?
In the nonsensical world of the AGW Political Propaganda Machine Ice growth = Warming.
Minus 50 and in danger of MELTING.
Drowning us all in oceans of…. Umm, not water, ’cause at minus 50 degrees, it’s a little bit, um, frozen. Yeah. How about that.
Statistics? More like “Crap. Listed”.
Gentlemen, we’ve reached the tipping point, all right, except it’s the tipping point of our sanity…. Sigh….
naught101
Ross’s letter is precise and assuming Steig is very familiar with the areas he mentions should be compelling for him. It is silly and perverse to assert that such a letter is merely anecdotal.
The McMurdo monthly temp data is here: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/work/gistemp/STATIONS//tmp.700896640008.1.1/station.txt
Ross appears to be essentially correct. Graphically and by inspection, there appears to be little if any trend over this 50 year record.
I remain bemused by the level of precision and certainty explicit and implicit in these articles and especially in the statements to the Press.
The reason no attempt has been made before to re-write the temperature record of Antarctica (like they have done with the rest of the world) is that Antarctica temp readings have been taken by trained scientists and high-trained meterologists using the best equipment available.
This should be the best temperature record that exists and there was no justification before to undo the stable or cooling temperature trend.
What Mann and Steig have really done here is call out all those dedicated scientists (freezing there ___ off in -55C) and say their records were no good.
No wonder they are not impressed.
I don’t get it. From the limited data set, it looks like temps have been going down.
http://ff.org/centers/csspp/library/co2weekly/20060907/20060907_02.pdf
How far do sats go? I thought I read 70 degrees, but the hole looks pretty small in the sea ice images… UAH and MSU, are there links for those records?
Ross Hayes is a very brave person. I hope he has another job lined up.
Also, Cryosphere Today is a joke.
A lesson in history.
Comments made by William.O.Field Pioneer Glaciologist, (in the 1960’s)
With about 90% of the worlds ice, Antarctica is a super refrigeration system.
The last ice age began retreating rapidly about 13,000 years ago, the melting raised the oceans some 400 ft. to there present level. What brought about this climatic pendulum. According to the”solar radiation theory, variations in the amount of energy radiated by the Sun produce climatic changes on Earth. Thus, during periods of less intense solar radiation, the Earth could be cooled sufficiently to trigger an ice age.
Closely linked with radiation is a second theory which holds that unexplained changes in the composition of the Earths atmosphere- increased cloud cover, for example-might black out some of the Sun’s radiation, and so lower the Earth’s temperature. A similar effect could be produced by natural air pollution, ( volcanic ash ) and possibly, concentrations of meteoric debris or other matter in space between us and the Sun.
Whatever the reason the whole subject is profoundly complex, with enough variables to defy all the worlds computers, and it will take forever for man to unravel the true story.
meanwhile where are we now? Are the world’s glaciers melting sufficiently to raise the sea level, or is the Earth cooling and heading for another ice age?
quote; Richard P.Goldthwait, founder, U.S.A. Institute of Polar Studies .
Very probably we are now in the middle or perhaps towards the end of an interglacial period lasting thousands of years. The Earth has swung back and forth between ice ages and interglacial periods for a million or two years and we can expect it to continue.
Cell phones produce so little radio power (about 50 to 100 milliwatts typically) that the total amount of radiated power is negligible compared to the 1365 watts per square meter of average solar energy impacting the earth’s surface.
Even at noon on the equator 1365 W/m^2 does not reach the surface.
Every thread that refers to the cell phone issue reminds of a book by Economist Thomas Sowell. Its subtitle is “Thinking Beyond Stage One”.
My ear and skull that surrounds my ear where the cell phone has been for 60 minutes is warm; therefore, the microwave radiation must have excited the water molecules in my ear and head, and is probably heating the atmoshere too.
From politicians, from AGW actiivists, and from individuals I keep reading and hearing “Stage One Thinking”.
Thanks to all of you on this website that help me to think to stage two and sometimes stage three. I don’t know if I am ready to think to stage four as I don’t know, and we all don’t know enough about the dynamics of our solar and weather system.
The ozone hole is there because the Antarctic is dark in the winter so no sunlight to produce ozone. Plus ozone is naturally unstable and has a half life of days or months: No need for cfcs, cosmic rays, etc to explain why the ozone hole is there. Can it be that simple?
“Cell phones on the other hand use a frequency band starting at 824 megahertz and end at 894 megahertz.”
This is one of a number of frequencies used by cell phones. The most common 3G band worldwide is 2.1GHz and phones designed for roaming will support 850/900/1800/1900/2100 Mhz.
If you want to blame wireless networking, look to all the WiFi devices which operate at 2.4GHz.
Bob: If you look at the dates he gave over at Real Climate, there was going from the 1935-1945 period cooling below the current temperature level till at least 1957/58. Warming started and ran until 1969, which was warmer than the rest of the cenury but not as warm at the 1935-1945 period. From 1969 the author says show cooling till the end of the century.
So the whole basis of warming in the Anarctic from 1935 on is the 11 year period between 1957/58 and 1969. It was cooling before that and cooling after that. That is some pretty impressive cherry picking if you ask me.
MarkM:
Is that the only possible conclusion?
Isn’t it more likely that the heat from the discharge of the phone’s battery up against your head for 60 minutes might account for the perceived warmth?
Interesting article w/video about the attacks on skeptical scientists: click
Smokey (07:17:15) :
I am sorry Smokey, I did not label that paragraph properly: SARCASM ALERT!
That sentence is a classic example of stage one thinking.
“his apparent argument against the use of statistics is weak”
Sorry, the shoe is definitely on the other foot. As Leon and Bill point out,
Dr. “I am not a statistician” Mann needs expert statistical and epistemological supervision on a worker release program, cff. Dr. Wegman’s report.
By tossing him this co-authorship bone, Dr.Steig has blundered badly.
So when Al Gore gets up to make his next PowerPoint presentation using Michael Mann’s Antarctic temperature data, will the graph he unveils come to be known as the ice hockey stick?
I’m somewhat puzzled by Ross Hays’ letter, since his criticisms do not seem to me to bear particularly upon the Steig paper:-
1. “There are very few stations in Antarctica to begin with and only a hand full with 50 years of data. “
This is recognised in Steig’s paper, as follows:
In essence, we use the spatial covariance structure of the surface temperature field to guide interpolation of the sparse but reliable 50-year-long records of 2-m temperature from occupied weather stations. Although it has been suggested that such interpolation is unreliable owing to the distances involved1, large spatial scales are not inherently problematic if there is high spatial coherence, as is the case in continental Antarctica4.
2. “Satellite data is just approaching thirty years of available information.” I presume Hays means MSU data. Steig uses surface IR measurements.
3. “In my experience as a day to day forecaster that has to travel and do field work in Antarctica the summer seasons have been getting colder.”
Steig is more in agreement with Hays than previous modeling simulations! See here:
The simulations show warming in austral summer and autumn, restricted to the peninsula, whereas in our reconstruction the greatest warming is in winter and spring, and in continental West Antarctica as well as on the peninsula.
Note that Steig is describing warming over the whole 50-year period not over the 1980s onwards period that Hays references. I don’t think Ross Hays has any first-hand experience to report from the ’50s. The paper’s findings are not, as far as I can see, necessarily in conflict with Hays’ recent experience – they report that weather stations generally show no significant annual trend in recent decades and thus, in the context of finding a ‘winter warming’ tendency overall, this may be in accord with Hays’ experience.
4. ” In a synoptic perspective the cooler sea surface temperatures have kept the maritime storms farther offshore in the summer season and the colder more dense air has rolled from the South Pole to the ice shelf.
There was a paper presented at the AMS Conference in New Orleans last year noting over 70% of the continent was cooling due to the ozone hole. We launch balloons into the stratosphere and the anticyclone that develops over the South Pole has been displaced and slow to establish itself over the past five seasons. The pattern in the troposphere has reflected this trend with more maritime (warmer) air around the Antarctic Peninsula…”
I see nothing in the Steig paper necessarily in conflict with Hays’ current meteorological observations. The conclusion is:
the future trajectory of Antarctic temperature change also depends on the extent to which changes in atmospheric composition (whether from greenhouse gases or stratospheric ozone) affect Southern Hemisphere sea ice and regional atmospheric circulation patterns. Improved representation in models of coupled atmosphere/sea-ice dynamics will be critical for forecasting Antarctic temperature change.
5. “…which is also where most of the automated weather stations are located for West Antarctica which will give you the average warmer readings and skew the data for all of West Antarctica.”
Frankly, this suggests that Hays has not read the paper carefully enough. Please refer to Figure 1, which shows very clearly that Hays’ presumption is wrong. Or else the following text explicitly shows that his presumption of automated stations being the basis of study is wrong:
In essence, we use the spatial covariance structure of the surface temperature field to guide interpolation of the sparse but reliable 50-year-long records of 2-m
temperature from occupied weather stations. (my bold).
AWS measurements are used only for estimating spatial co-variance: the density of their distribution cannot ‘skew’ the results.
With statistics you can make numbers go to almost any conclusion you want. It saddens me to see members of the scientific community do this for media coverage.
Hmm. I don’t think that’s a scientific criticism, so I’ll reserve comment.
My unreserved apology to every one reading my posts on mobile phones. Clearly my irony was lost. I had hoped my references to Michael Mann and the science being as valid as a hockey stick graph would flag it for people.
I failed to communicate it properly, my mistake, it won’t happen again
Neil
Stephen Parrish (04:26:02) :
I’m not certain how much longer Americans can afford to be spectators of their political and government betters. This site and Climate Audit are not spectating, but have planted a banner at which to rally. Enough of us have rallied at these banners, now we need to plant a new banner closer to the front.
Very true.
“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more…”
No quarter!