Guest post by Steven Goddard
Two days ago I questioned how Antarctic ice could be both “melting faster than expected” and “expanding” at the same time. Yet (as WUWT has noted before) the answer is obvious – according to NASA, most of Antarctica is both cooling rapidly and heating rapidly at the same time.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=6502
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/WilkinsIceSheet/images/wilkins_avh_2007.jpg
Since nearly the entire continent is both cooling and heating simultaneously, it makes perfect sense (using AGW logic) that the ice would be rapidly expanding and rapidly retreating simultaneously. In 2004, NASA thought that Antarctica was cooling by as much as 15 degrees C per century. But after three more years of cooling, they changed the map to show a warming trend in 2007.
The hot red warming trend seen in the second map has a stated uncertainty of “between 2-3 degrees Celsius” which means that it might actually represent a rapid cooling trend, rather than a warming trend. Vostok is averaging -96F this week. Does that make anyone think of hot, red colors?
Penguins trying to keep cool in NASA’s rapidly warming world
Nylo posted a link to an excellent parody of the state of Antarctic climate science, written by Dr. John Christy.
“What we believe,” Dr. Frost told ecoEnquirer, “is that a new paradigm is needed in scientific thought. Since mutually exclusive sets of scientific results usually are published in respected scientific publications, we suggest that they are both true. There is a higher level of physical understanding that must be developed, one where the Yin and Yang of scientific findings are reconciled, better understood, and appreciated.”
Good to see tax dollars hard at work, supporting serious and coherent science from the same organisation which put men on the moon – 40 years ago this July.
Shakespeare apparently saw AGW coming:
Much Ado About Nothing
The Comedy of Errors
All’s Well That Ends Well
Measure for Measure A Midsummer Night’s Dream The Tempest
Ah, quantum climate change in which the climate assumes all states until it is oberved, at which point it collapses into a roaring heat wave when oberved by an AGW enthusiast, and into a blizzard when observed by a climate realist. Yes, this is a great advance in climate science.
OT
You really should read this paper, I like it more every time I pick it up, not Antarctic, but still.
http://www.atypon-link.com/IAHS/doi/abs/10.1623/hysj.54.2.394
Hydrological Sciences–Journal–des Sciences Hydrologiques, 54(2) April 2009
DISCUSSION of “The implications of projected climate change
for freshwater resources and their management”*
Climate, hydrology and freshwater: towards an interactive
incorporation of hydrological experience into climate research
DEMETRIS KOUTSOYIANNIS1, ALBERTO MONTANARI2, HARRY F. LINS3
& TIMOTHY A. COHN3
1 Department of Water Resources and Environmental Engineering, Faculty of Civil Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Heroon Polytechneiou 5, GR-157 80 Zographou, Greece dk@itia.ntua.gr
2 Dipartimento di Ingegneria delle Strutture, dei Trasporti, delle Acque, del Rilevamento del Territorio, Faculty of Engineering, University of Bologna, I-40136 Bologna, Italy alberto.montanari@unibo.it
3 US Geological Survey, MS 415, Reston, Virginia 20192, USA
hlins@usgs.gov; tacohn@usgs.gov
“Given the political implications of IPCC, particularly with respect to potentially adverse consequences of greenhouse gas emissions, one may understand the article’s focus (as with most IPCC texts) on negative impacts of projected climate change, especially catastrophic events. Yet we think that the necessary balance is provided seemingly as an afterthought by the last three sentences of the article, which note that: (1) the impacts of climate change, and the most effective ways of adapting to change, depend on local conditions; (2) climate change is superimposed onto other pressures on water resources; and (3) little can be said about the implications of climate change for the availability of safe water for the most vulnerable. Indeed, these concluding sentences illustrate the difficulties in predicting the future of water resources, the complexity of water resources problems, the numerous factors affecting them, and the dominance of local conditions.”
“The IPCC models (i.e. GCMs reported by IPCC) were not subject to such validation (the term “validation” does not appear in IPCC AR4) and, therefore, the reliability of the outputs of these models, that have been used to assess the impacts on water resources, is not tested. Recent independent studies on the validation of IPCC models (Douglass et al., 2008; Frank, 2008; Koutsoyiannis et al., 2008a) indicate a rather poor performance, especially on long-term (climatic) scales.”
There is more….
Lucy Skywalker,
Oh the power of colour!
It was used, to great success, during the Cold War. NATO countries were always depicted in cool blue, the Warsaw Pact countries in hot, deep, red. Guess which looked most ‘frightening’ on the map?
Nowadays, NOAA and GISS use red, for example, to demonstrate the Siberian anomaly making it look as if there is a huge amount of warming happening, even though the actual temperatures remain well below freezing. They also use distorted world map projections as well that exaggerate the effects as one moves N and S from the equator, but that is slightly OT.
Robert, I met Mr. Truman once. He told me he had one of Elvis’ pink Cadillacs in storage where he lived. Now he and it are about 200 feet under the new level of Spirit Lake. Lesson: Don’t fool with Mother Nature.
I did it using the process of “feedback massaging”
I did not have the fortune to work on one of the Apollo landers but I did do orbit determination on one of the manned lunar missions and the data confirmed that trip to the moon and back.
This was before the Hansen “fudge the data” regime.
The derivatives on the orbital solution were very small on the data compared to the anomaly’s that NASA produces now and my boss would not accept anything less especially since lives were at stake.
Adolpho just used the second photo you posted and killed the reds a bit. His source is you?
He should have mapped the reds straight into blue, and since the color range would be less than the SD they should be the very same blues as the cold range.
Adolfo Giurfa (10:45:34) :This is the antarctic picture before massaging
http://www.giurfa.com/wilkins2007.jpg
REPLY: What is the source of that photo, can you reference where you got it? – Anthony
I think the blue one looks like the fake. Blue boundaries? Look at this lookalike I just photoshopped
It is an exciting place, West Antarctica. Divided from the geologically stable East Antarctic craton by one of the largest active rift valleys on the planet with active volcanoes still building the Transantarctic Mountain range to the south and east (i.e. Terror, Erebus) of the valley, the 25-odd Km thick (thin) valley crust stretches (literally, i.e. a recent extension in the Bentley subglacial trench, only 21 Km thick) under the two major ice shelves, the Ross and Weddell. To the North of the rift there is a domed active volcanic hotspot, rivalling Yellowstone in area, called Marie Byrd land, also with active volcanoes, and then to the Antarctic Peninsula, an active subduction zone with it’s own active volcanic landscape.
To add to the confusion the Land is covered by Glaciers, and is dark and very cold on the surface for at least 6 of the 12 months of the year, which makes geological or vulcanological research rather difficult in the area. Even automatic seismographic stations are difficult to set up, maintain and monitor, or even relocate, when buried under metres of drifted snow in a single season.
And some people would have us believe that the 2-3 degrees of local warming, in terms of a short satellite temperature record in the West Antarctic is due to atmospheric causes mostly half a hemisphere away.
Maybe, but unconvincing to me.
Even local human activity down there must have a significant effect in the region:
Adolfo you crummy b*****! Just trying to prove us skeptics are gullible!
🙂 🙂
Seriously talking, and photoshoping aside, it would be interesting to know more about the origin of this “bi-polarity”. As far as I know down there it goes the pacific warm waters to take a cool break and going upwards again as the cold “Humboldt´s current”. If this is so, and being warm pacific waters no so warm due to la Nina and winter time approaching SH, the antarctica peninsula will cool down a bit in the months to come.
Big OT but I couldn’t resist
There have been big headlines over the past couple of days on Swine Flu. I thought “Oh great, how long before this is blamed on Global Warming” But before I posted, I thought, what the hell, let me check Google.
You guessed it! Here’s a question from and unidentified person asked on Yahoo in response to the Bloomberg report:
“This outbreak is predicted to become a pandemic. Did this happen because of global warming?
Could we have stopped this if we just cared about our planet just a little more?
* 7 hours ago
* – 4 days left to answer.”
Let me suggest that this person lacks some critical thinking skills
Actually, it’s better called Post-Modernism. As far as I understand this strange academic posture, every discipline simply creates ‘narratives’, with their own internal logics. The ‘narrative’ of science is simply that espoused or told by scientists, and has no necessary relationship to empirical fact or ‘truth’.
It is surely a newer wrinkle on Relativism, which it presumes: no ‘narrative’ is any better than any other. On this view, the ‘climate change’ narrative is just as valid as the ‘skeptical’ one, and doubtless better because of the good intentions of its adherents.
That of coure morphs the whole farrago of non-sense into what passes for ‘liberalism’ these days.
/Mr Lynn
I agree with Mitchel44 that this new paper by
DEMETRIS KOUTSOYIANNIS1, ALBERTO MONTANARI2, HARRY F. LINS3
& TIMOTHY A. COHN3
“”http://www.atypon-link.com/IAHS/doi/abs/10.1623/hysj.54.2.394″”
is very much worth the time to read.
Dr. Frost ….
There is a higher level of physical understanding that must be developed, one where the Yin and Yang of scientific findings are reconciled, better understood, and appreciated.
Who is this YinYang?
Hi
First point thanks for a brilliant site, just so very sad the debate is contained to the internet rather than by and large the main stream press, I need to confess I am an engineer working in a coal fired power station which I guess makes me son of Satan. I have spent many hours looking at all the information regarding AGW and have come down firmly on the side of the skeptic approach (And no its not a case of biting the hand that feeds me). I like many others do not possess the knowledge required to understand climate variations or model the future climate. I tend to have to view the issue in simple heat exchanger terms (terminal temperature difference). That is if we assume the sun is the source of heat, the earth receives the heat derived from the sun and in the short term stores some of the heat, and then consider space is the sink of the heat. Logic would state that primarily solar energy variations would drive global temperatures. CO2 would have a relatively minor effect in the earths capacity to act as a storage heater in comparison with say water vapour. One question to all:- why does the main stream media not latch on to the growing dissent on the AGW / IPCC theories.
Perhaps an unfounded concern, and if so please put me to rights, but I presume satellite surface temperatures are reduced to sea level for the purposes of mapping. Since a large part of Antarctica lies at elevations between 2000 and 4000 metres, (see)
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=5081
the temperature correction must be substantial. Is this temperature correction gradient constant in all climatic conditions and seasons and does it introduce an element of significant uncertainty particularly at the most elevated areas? I understand ground station corroboration is not available for most of Antartica. I can envisage a minor revision to the gradient could swing temperatures significantly, and maybe erroneously, unless carefully normalised over the whole dataset.
Interesting (to me) that the spokesman for this subject goes by the name of “Frost”. Certainly no rime……. nor reason.
Brent Salgat (09:04:49) :
“The second fiery looking map has a rang of .2 degrees c per/yr and and accuracy of 2-3 degrees C .
I guess that is suppose to make sense”
I thought I was misunderstanding that when I read it, because it didn’t make sense to me. I did read it right? If that is the case, what the hell is the point of that map?! “This is what’s happening as long as we aren’t 1000-1500% off?”
Somebody please tell me that’s not what’s going on here.
Classic!
…..1…..Steve Goddard expands on The Australian’s conflating of the decreasing (thick) ice, with the increasing (thin) sea ice. Neither mentions the worry that the main ice sheet might be ultimately held back by this melting ice……2…..Much of the uncertainty about East Antarctic temperatures is due to the paucity of weather stations in the interior. Is it necessary to explain why? The more recent study was based on calibrating satellite measurements with peripheral weather stations……3…..The hard part is explaining why the sea ice is expanding, since the Southern Ocean is warming faster than any other ocean. With greater evaporation, there will be more snowfall on the sea ice. But one explanation said that it wasn’t the snowfall, but “stratification” of the waters below. Whatever–the answer is more likely to lie in nature (mumble “the ozone hole” mumble); rather than in the motivations of men……The easy part is just looking at the first map, to explain the rest. Warming iln the Southern Ocean and West Antarctica, and on the Antarctic Peninsula. East Antarctica is expected to remain cold; partly because it has the additional altitude effect, from its 6500 ft average thickness.
Robinson (14:21:43)
This is true. Their observations can have a chilling effect…..on business!
Just add heat bias to the model.
Too funny!
Ohioholic (14:21:12) : Don´t worry, it´s just a matter of a few NANODEGREES 🙂
It´s their way of “massaging statistics”. “End justifies means”
OT-
Good god! When will somebody, anybody have the balls to stand up to Gore and Waxman and tell them they are lying to the world?
We are on the verge of world’s biggest tax and the lemmings are running for the cliffs at full speed!
Didn’t anyone respond to the Yahooer who asked about pandemic & global warming?
Someone should tell him that global cooling & pandemics go together like soup & sandwich. As the population’s relative health declines due to scarcity of food and fuel to keep warm, the viruses get the upper hand. The carriers of the disease, finding a decaying world to feed upon, multiply & spread.
When Lord Monckton spoke about the greater ability of cold to kill, he said a mouthful. Multi-faceted, let me count the ways. Add poor nutrition from junk food and GMO’s. Add failing inseticides and antibiotics. Add mutated specimens escaped or stolen from labs as biological warfare experiments increase the risk of accident. Add depenedence on heating sources that get cut off due to lack of payment or greed.