From the Australian. (h/t to Andrew Bolt)
With weather stations like the ones below, it might be a bit hard to separate the real temperature signal of Antarctica from your local UHI. I wonder how much more cooling would be evident in the data had the weather stations been placed away from the “living pods”?
This picture on a postage stamp from Australia, celebrating the Australian Antarctic Territory in 1997, may help settle the issue. Note the Stevenson Screen near the “living pod” on the right.
Here is the larger photo of the first day of issue card, the Stevenson Screen is also just visible above the snowbank in the lower right. Rather close to human habitation I’d say. Looks like its in the middle of a small AHI (Antarctic Heat Island).
Click for larger image
They have propane heat, apparently:
Here is what Australia’s Mawson Station looked like circa 1956-1957:
And here is what Mawson station looks like today, as of Feb09. It appears they dumped the “living pods”. Maybe a little “urban growth” going on there?
Here’s another picture of a Stevenson Screen close to a building in Antarctica, from the British Antarctic Survey:
![[10004058]](http://www.photo.antarctica.ac.uk/external/guest/image/water/70/10004058)
Location: Fossil Bluff, Alexander Island
Season: 1994/1995
Photographer: Pete Bucktrout
THE Bureau of Meteorology has backed down from a claim that temperatures at Australia’s three bases in Antarctica have been warming over the past three decades.
A senior bureau climatologist had accused The Weekend Australian of manufacturing a report that temperatures were cooling in East Antarctica, where Australia’s Mawson, Davis and Casey bases are located.
The trend of temperatures and ice conditions in Antarctica is central to the debate on global warming because substantial melting of the Antarctic ice cap, which contains 90 per cent of the world’s ice, would be required for sea levels to rise.
While calvings from ice shelves in parts of West Antarctica have generated headlines, evidence has emerged that temperatures are cooling in the east of the continent, which is four times the size of West Antarctica.
Contrary to widespread public perceptions, the area of sea ice around the continent is expanding.
The Weekend Australian reported last month a claim by Bureau of Meteorology senior climatologist Andrew Watkins that monitoring at Australia’s Antarctic bases since the 1950s indicated temperatures were rising. A study was then published by the British Antarctic Survey that concluded the ozone hole was responsible for the cooling and expansion of sea ice around much of the continent.
The head of the study project, John Turner, said at the time that the section of Antarctica that included the Australian bases was among the areas that had cooled.
Dr Watkins said The Weekend Australian had misrepresented the results of the BAS study, which made no findings about temperatures at Australian bases.
When it was pointed out to Dr Watkins that Professor Turner had been quoted directly, Dr Watkins said his bureau, and not the BAS, was the agency collecting temperature data.
“You kept going until you got the answer you wanted,” Dr Watkins said.
“You were told explicitly that the data collected by the Bureau of Metereology at the Australian bases shows a warming for maximum temperatures at all bases, and minimum temperatures at all but Mawson.”
However, Professor Turner told The Weekend Australian the data showed a cooling of the East Antarctica coast associated with the onset of the ozone layer from 1980 onwards. Professor Turner said the monthly mean temperatures for Casey station from 1980 to 2005 showed a cooling of 0.45C per decade. In autumn, the temperature trend has been a cooling of 0.93C per decade.
“These fairly small temperature trends seem to be consistent to me with the small increase in sea ice extent off the coast,” he said.
Dr Watkins did not dispute the figures referred to by Professor Turner.
Referring to the bureau’s data collection since the 1950s, Dr Watkins said Professor Turner’s figures were “only half of the full data set”.
However, Dr Watkins admitted that analysis of the data might show “an ozone-induced cooling trend in the latter half of the record” — a reference to the past three decades.
Dr Watkins declined to release the temperature data to The Weekend Australian. He said it had still to be fully analysed by the bureau.
Nationals Senate leader Barnaby Joyce said he hoped all government agencies would co-operate in helping to inform the global warming debate.
“These agencies need to be able to dispense the facts without fear or bias,” he said.
“‘These agencies need to be able to dispense the facts without fear or bias,” he said “.
I need to check in with my eye doctor; the first time I read that sentence, I could have sworn that I saw the word ‘with’ after ‘dispense.
But most revealing of the apparatchik mentality is this notion that ‘facts’ are not objective things, situations and happenings in the physical realm but are, rather, commodities manufactured and ‘dispensed’ by bureaucrats and ‘experts’, as the nurse dispenses valium.
“You were told explicitly that the Emperor was not naked! It is the job of the Ministry of Fashion to determine what is and is not clothing. So sit down put your thumb in your mouth and believe what you’re told!”
‘…17th Century thinking promotes prophets of doom, guilt and penance.”
You mean folks like Descartes, Galileo, Boyle, Newton, Leibniz, Spinoza, Huyghens…?
Urgent! Read K.J. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science.
Dr Watkins declined to release the temperature data to The Weekend Australian. He said it had still to be fully analysed by the bureau.
Shouldn’t that be ‘massaged’? What is there to analyse about a list of recorded temperatures..?
Some actual data:
http://i260.photobucket.com/albums/ii14/sherro_2008/MAWSON1955TO2006.jpg?t=1241270912
http://i260.photobucket.com/albums/ii14/sherro_2008/DavisAntarctictempAnomaly.jpg?t=1241271003
http://i260.photobucket.com/albums/ii14/sherro_2008/Macquariegraph.jpg?t=1241271107
You tell me if it’s warming.
How do you hide the disappointment that this is not happening?
http://i260.photobucket.com/albums/ii14/sherro_2008/MOAHockystick.jpg?t=1241271264
I’ve read that the Ozone Hole was “discovered” in 1985. Can anyone tell me, definitively, that there was no Ozone hole in 1984? 1983? 1982? etc. Were we looking?
This is all sounding like the street con, Three Card Monte. Bent data. 😉
“You were told explicitly that the data collected by the Bureau of Metereology at the Australian bases shows a warming for maximum temperatures at all bases,”
Do we have an integrity problem here?
Believe what I tell you, not what you know.
Scott Brady….
I read somewhere that the very first time US scientists measured the Ozone in Antartica in the 1950s!, they found the hole. I dont know if this is a myth of not
It seems to me to be a manufactured 3-ring circus (north pole, south pole, and land glaciers mixed with sea levels). If they all speak at once and say amazing things, we will be mesmerized by the pretty lights and fast talk. Meanwhile, the carnie hawkers (bedfellows known as corporations and politicians) are underneath the stands picking our pockets while our attention is diverted to the action of the 3-ring display.
This message should have been posted on Thermaggedon thread; however, it’s very interesting to know the thermentality of AGWers and every skeptic should read it:
http://www.who.int/globalchange/publications/infectdiseases/en/index.html
Download the full report. 🙂
Craig Moore (07:45:21) :
Yep!
All these great minds relegated to scientific legerdemain.
I cringe for them, at the thought of the ensuing ignominy.
Get out now! Please!
The possibility of temperature sensors being affected by sources of Infared radiation must be well known. As well, the colder the environment the more pronounced the effect of nearby radiation would be. Recently I have been reading a facinating book written by William John Gordon in 1907 by the name
” Round about the North Pole”. It is archived on the web here.
http://www.archive.org/details/roundaboutnorthp00gord
The book chronicles the explorations of the arctic regions up to that time and is very well written. Pages 76 to 83 tell of the Italian explorer Umberto Cagni’s attempt to reach the pole leaving Teplitz Bay, Franz Josef land in March 1900, where he had to turn back when he was less than 4 degrees of lattitude from the pole. The part of the book that is pertinent to this current story is found on page 78, where the author relates that Cagni had a difficult time recording accurate temperatures because, just approching the thermometer would raise it a couple of degrees when the temperature was around -22 and as much as 4 degrees at -58. What strikes me as amazing is that in 1900 scientists knew of the effect of radiant heat on temperature recording devices and yet in current times don’t realize that they must keep their sensors a reasonable distance from the heat of their little community in the antarctic that was built for the express purpose of making accurate measurements of things like tempurature. The first paragraph of chapter 1 is also pertinent to our current time in that the author admits to the then current knowledge that the arctic ice is by no means eternal as evidenced by the fossil record among other evidence. Somehow many of today’s enlightened climate scientists seem to have lost that knowledge and instead believe that only God’s highest order creation is responsible for the demise of polar Ice. Somehow I think that God is about to show them that he, not man, is still in control of the climate.
I’m sure we just have to wait for there to be no more temperature in Antarctica so all the data can be released.
I think a whole new set of independent weather stations are needed. Its like steroids in baseball. All the records that have been broken have to have an asterisk beside them and a clean slate of clean atheletes from here going forward is needed to connect up with the former chain of records. Present government and quasi government climate scientists need to have their performance altering methods and fixes taken away from them and a new set of honest apolitical players need to be fielded.
Is there a law that prevents setting up independent weather stations with the best design and locations in Anarctica and the arctic, or for that matter, across the world? Is there a law that allows authorities to withold data paid for by taxpayers? After all these are not military secrets. Maybe recruiting engineering schools across the world to set up independent best-design weather stations according to best practices regarding location that can be monitored remotely could be done somehow and all the raw data collected by the satellites that we own could be receivable by anyone. If its a question of the possibility of the world coming to an end as we know it, surely its not an excessive idea. I worry that as the AGW pandemic winds down, there will be a disappearance of the raw data or substitution of it to show that they were right at the time but now things are changing.
Anybody out there know if raw data can be obtained in real time by other than the establishment?
“The trend of temperatures and ice conditions in Antarctica is central to the debate on global warming because substantial melting of the Antarctic ice cap, which contains 90 per cent of the world’s ice, would be required for sea levels to rise.”
Of course, sea level is rising now, albeit slowly, due to thermal expansion. And the meltwater from most of the mountaintop glaciers. And Greenland.
Antarctic conditions are a CONSEQUENCE of global warming. The AGW debate centers on the northern hemisphere, because that is where most of the land area is. Unlike the oceans, land isn’t able to absorb the added greenhouse effect heat.
And this leads (somehow) to the largest temperature increases being in the Arctic. Where sits the Greenland ice cap; that represents 23 feet of sea level rise.
“Substantial melting” is an end game (we lost) consequence. A useful perspective: a one meter sea level rise will create 100,000,000 refugees.
AlanG (02:44:21) :
Agreed, bit more detail on what Netweathers UK Summer forecast is at
http://thurgarton.wordpress.com/2009/05/01/uk-met-office-vs-others/
Dr. Watkins is probably doing the right thing.
Don’t give them raw data that has not been corrected for heat island effects, else they will run off with cherrypicked analyses for their pet Thermageddon stories.
Dr Watkins did not dispute the figures referred to by Professor Turner.
And that’s most likely due to not much changing down there. It’s still the uninhabitable place it has been, and will continue to be. Warm a degree or cool a degree, it’s still the popsickle continent. It ain’t going anywhere.
The whole bit about the ozone hole causing more ice is science stretched and tortured to its breaking point. It appears to be an attempt to justify that there IS a statistically significant increase in Antarctic sea ice. The claim about the ozone hole is the result of a model experiment and it’s not clear that it is a testable hypothesis (not that there’s anything wrong with that in AGW science where correlation is causation). The study is Geophysical Research Letters and abstract can be viewed at:
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009GL037524.shtml
This overlooks a couple of things. CFCs have been banned for quite a while and the “hole” should be decreasing. The best part is something that the MSM conveniently leaves out; the final sentence of the abstract states: “However, statistics derived from a climate model control run suggest that the observed sea ice increase might still be within the range of natural climate variability.”
Francis (09:57:33) :
“The trend of temperatures and ice conditions in Antarctica is central to the debate on global warming because substantial melting of the Antarctic ice cap, which contains 90 per cent of the world’s ice, would be required for sea levels to rise.”
Of course, sea level is rising now, albeit slowly, due to thermal expansion. And the meltwater from most of the mountaintop glaciers. And Greenland.
Antarctic conditions are a CONSEQUENCE of global warming. The AGW debate centers on the northern hemisphere, because that is where most of the land area is. Unlike the oceans, land isn’t able to absorb the added greenhouse effect heat.
And this leads (somehow) to the largest temperature increases being in the Arctic. Where sits the Greenland ice cap; that represents 23 feet of sea level rise.
“Substantial melting” is an end game (we lost) consequence. A useful perspective: a one meter sea level rise will create 100,000,000 refugees”.
Francis,
Sea levels have stopped rising at all recently and there is nothing wrong with Antarctica, Greenland or our climate.
It is even expected that the current growth of the Antarctic Icecap will cause the ocean levels to sink in the short term future.
The trend you describe obviously originates from your mindset, obsessed from catestrophic events leading to “the end game”.
Some Psychiatrists have linked this kind of thinking to a “depression” which can easily be treated with medicine.
This is a very good article, and quite eye opening. However, there is a very huge fundamental problem with this talk about 1.0C/per decade, or 0.2C/per year kind of thing. For example, this supposes that at a constant level of atmospheric CO2, say 380ppm, that the temperature will continue to rise at a particular rate, seemingly to infinity. So, by discontinuing adding any additional CO2 to the atmosphere, at some point far far in the future, the planet will melt? This is beyond preposterous, but this is exactly how the AGW camp presents this, but nobody seems to look any further. If this really where how things worked, then if I begin to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere to some predetermined temperature neutral point, say 250ppm, then if I accidentally drop just below that, won’t that mean that eventually the planet would be an ice ball? Again, this method of CO2 –> Temperature relationship is completely impossible.
Given the virtually infinite ability of AGWers to rationalize away the self-evident, it’s just a matter time that criticisim of the poor siting at these Antarctic stations will be be blown away by the claim that the instruments are all “upwind” of the human habitats.
You could be correct, only problem is, there isn’t any sea level rise!
Dave Wendt (01:36:32) : Exactly how does that work?
When I was in high school they introduced “new math” into the curriculum. Dr. Watkins must have had the same classes. All you have to do is change bases, transform the numbers, translate to Latin, take the absolute value, multiple by i, then reverse the processes, and when you finish cooling has become warming. Simple, really!
The UHI affect on antarctic temp data is somewhat apparent in the data for the Amundson Scott station from GISS.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=700890090008&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
This graph shows a step change in the 1980s (downwards) and a marked change in amplitude of readings 1980. Post 1980s there were major changes in operations at Amundsen-Scott (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amundsen-Scott_South_Pole_Station)
I am guessing that new construction, large seasonal changes in the number of personal and siting of temperature sensors may be a factor.