Guest Post by Steven Goddard
From time to time we hear that various places on earth have been “warming much faster than the rest of the planet – as predicted by “the models.” One of the places commonly mentioned in that list is the Arctic, based largely on 30 years of satellite data. Fortunately though, we are not limited by 30 years of satellite data, as the Danish Meteorological Institute has records going back to 1958 and GISSTEMP has even longer records.
Below is a visual comparison of DMI 1958 Arctic temperatures vs. 2009, showing that temperatures have hardly changed since the start of their record.
2009 Daily Mean Temperatures North of 80 degrees
Below is an overlay directly showing that 2009 temperatures (green) are similar to 1958 (red) and close to the mean. Blue is mean temperature for the 41 year record.
So if the Arctic has warmed since 1979, how can it be the about same as 1958? The answer can be seen in the GISSTEMP graph below of Godthab, Greenland.
Temperatures have warmed since the start of the satellite record, but they cooled even more between 1940 and 1980.
Everyone (including NSIDC) quietly acknowledges that most of the Arctic was warmer in the 1940s than now – so they shift the warming argument to the Alaska side. However, that argument also has problems. Alaska temperatures rose at the positive PDO shift in 1977, and have cooled again with the recent negative PDO shift – as seen below. 2008 was notable in that Alaska glaciers started to increase in size.
If you look at only one leg of a cycle, you will come to the wrong conclusion about the shape of the graph. Thus I would argue that Dr. Spencer’s fourth order curves are much more meaningful than the nearly meaningless linear fits being used by most prominent climate scientists. Climate is primarily cyclical, as every good climate scientist should know.
Vostok Ice Core Temperature Records
Steve
Sorry, it was the second link on your reply I should have referenced
http://docs.google.com/File?id=ddw82wws_20d886qwcz_b
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/10/16/nsidcs-dr-walt-meier-answers-reader-questions-on-sea-ice/
I will be away from a computer for next few days so hope you can reply before I go, otherwise I will be pondering this all weekend!
TonyB
TonyB,
Western Alaska temperatures are moderated by it’s proximity to the Pacific Ocean. During the last ice age, sea level was low and people were able to migrate to North America by walking across the Bering Strait.
Steven Goddard: If you can find the up-to-date anomaly data for the ERA surface temperature data North of 80N, it will most likely rise some more from 2002 to 2005, then decrease to present. But present anomalies, most likely, will not have dropped anywhere close to 1959 levels. Here’s a comparative graph of the ERA40 Surface Temperature data from 1957 to 2002 and UAH MSU TLT for the same Polar area, 80N-90N, from 1979 to present. Mind you, I realize that the UAH data is interpolated up at those latitudes, but it provides a ballpark. Also, the ERA40 data is a reconstruction, but I don’t know anything more about it.
http://i43.tinypic.com/2d1wzfs.jpg
More on the Arctic
In 2006 Michael Mann and Phil Jones wrote on RealClimate about Artic temperatures and especially about Svalbard temperature records for 2006:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/05/more-on-the-arctic/langswitch_lang/zh
Referring to the 2006 April Svalbard temperature of 0.0 C they said “Under the assumption of stationary ‘normal’ statistics, such an event is considered astronomically improbable (< 1 in 10E6)”.
The Svalbard Luft station has only been working since 1977. During that time the temperatures have gone up and down. However, the April 2009 GISS temperature was -15.9 C which is -15.9 C colder than April 2006. This is 5.6 C colder than the average April (as compared to 1978-2008 period for which measured data exists). The April has been colder on in 1988 and 1979.
So it does not look too bad for the Arctic temperatures and ice.
Steve:
Could we get the data set for this?
I’d like to do some curve fits in Excel.
Looks to me that after a 2nd or 3rd order fit, you’d have a nice SD type
comparison and you could say, “NO statistically significant difference.”
Of course some of the folks in the AGW crowd would probably need a remedial statistics course to understand what that means.
Anthony When are we going to get some useful feedback on this situation?
1. http://eva.nersc.no/vhost/arctic-roos.org/doc/observations/images/ssmi1_ice_area.png
2. http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.jpg
3. etc…
REPLY: From your tone, are you suggesting that I should drop everything I’m currently doing to answer your specific question? Check comments first. – Anthony
Expedition Leader Pen Hadow revealed that initial Survey results show the average ice thickness in the region to be 1.774m. The data collected will now be delivered to “scientists to interpret”.
I prefer the term “spin doctors to spin”, as being more accurate.
http://www.catlinarcticsurvey.com/latestfromtheice
Interesting stuff.
I can’t remember: was 1958 at solar maximum or solar minimum?
Would this have any implications for your interpretation?
And now we have had, horror of horrors, two days of 74s in the key radition measurement during solar cycles, is the remainder of 2009 likely to shoot ahead or stay close to the 1958 curve?
Questions as I am ignorant and have no knowledge!!!
Anthony this was certainly not directed at you or the site which I admire ad infinitum!. I think we need to a bit skeptical due to past events? (the sites). There is also of course this issue
http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/EPS/SST/data/anomnight.5.14.2009.gif
versus
http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_anom.html
why is the meditterenean SST consistently cooler in one and not the other? Just asking I hope thats OK.
I gotta admit that if the current 390 ppm CO2 were plotted on the Vostok chart, it would be quite striking compared to previous peaks. WUWT?
Here Comes the Sun?
Nature today publishes:
http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090513/full/459152f.html
“Quiet Sun enters new sunspot cycle
NASA
After a prolonged lull in activity, sunspots, and their associated solar storms, are on the rise again.”
Cycle 24 or not?
Polar regions rely upon chaotic transport from lower latitudes rather than upon direct insolation as the source of heat. The natural variability of temperatures thus rises with latitude. Without taking this factor into account, the fact that absolute anomalies have been higher recently in the Arctic than globally is quite meaningless.
>>Meanwhile, the BBC continues with its arctic propaganda …
>>falsely claiming that their data supports the idea that the
>> ice will vanish soon.
Hilarious BBC report, this one. The Catlin team found a slice of pressure-induced open water that had obviously RE-FROZEN with a thin layer of ice (about 10 cms), and said this was evidence of Arctic melting.
The BBC is about as trustworthy, nowadays, as the old Soviet Pravda. It is a shame they are not the laughing-stock of the media, but unfortunately most of the media plays along.
.
Global warming: been there, done that
Australian geologist Ian Plimer says that the planet has warmed and cooled many times before. And humans aren’t to blame.
http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/global_warming_been_there_done_that/
That’s why I welcomed the chance this week to interview Australian geologist Ian Plimer about his latest book, Heaven and earth: global warming, the missing science. Plimer is Australia’s best-known geologist and a professor at the University of Adelaide. His book has created quite a stir in the media. Leading journalists have lumped him together with anti-Semitic nutters as a climate change “denialist” and colleagues are shredding his claims in the letters pages.
Plimer makes two simple and challenging points. First, climate is always changing. In the past, the earth has been both much colder and much warmer than it is today. It is exceedingly difficult to understand, let alone what causes these changes. Second, the sun is the single greatest cause of fluctuations in the heat of the earth. Very small changes in solar output have a profound effect upon temperatures. The sun is the single greatest agent in climate change, not CO2, he maintains.
As he wrote in a recent newspaper article:
In the past, climate change has never been driven by CO2. Why should it be now driven by CO2 when the atmospheric CO2 content is low? The main greenhouse gas has always been water vapour. Once there is natural global warming, then CO2 in the atmosphere increases. CO2 is plant food, it is not a pollutant and it is misleading non-scientific spin to talk of carbon pollution. If we had carbon pollution, the skies would be black with fine particles of carbon. We couldn’t see or breathe.
What about criticism from colleagues? Plimer isn’t worried. “You can count the number of scientists who are critical of me on a sawmiller’s hand,” he told me, and nearly all geologists will agree with him. I sensed a certain professional scorn for anaemic nerds who massage computer models of climate under fluorescent lights instead of getting sweaty and sunburned fossicking for strange rocks.
Runner up to “Best Quote of the week”:
I sensed a certain professional scorn for anaemic nerds who massage computer models of climate under fluorescent lights instead of getting sweaty and sunburned fossicking for strange rocks.
Ian Plimer
As quoted by Ed Scott (08:36:18) :
KBK,
Here is a good one for you – during the Ordovician, there was an ice age with CO2 levels 10X current values at 4,000 PPM
http://ff.org/centers/csspp/library/co2weekly/2005-08-18/dioxide_files/image002.gif
WUWT?
Plimer makes two simple and challenging points. First, climate is always changing. In the past, the earth has been both much colder and much warmer than it is today. It is exceedingly difficult to understand, let alone what causes these changes. Second, the sun is the single greatest cause of fluctuations in the heat of the earth. Very small changes in solar output have a profound effect upon temperatures. The sun is the single greatest agent in climate change, not CO2, he maintains.
Web Hosting
OT, but I guess that large plage area finally managed to develop a few sunspecks…and it’s a stretch to call them specks! LOL
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/mdi_igr/1024/latest.html
Anthony, it’s off-topic (well, kinda) but the NSIDC might be having technical difficulties again according to them huge chunks of ice are dissipating and their graph and taken quite an increasingly steep and swift downturn….I smells data-altering…..but that could just be me and my inner conspiracy theorist. 🙂
Frankly, there is very little surprising in these posts for someone who has read “Global Warming: Myth or Reality, the erring ways of climatology by Professor Marcel Leroux, Springer Praxis 2005”. Everything one needs to know to debunk the fake announcements, the fake warmist science and understand why certain melting occurs in some places and go way past the statistical meteorology PDO, El-Nino type is in this book: this is the best present one can offer anyone needing answers and insight into meteorology and climatology. It can virtually change your life.
OT: Anthony is climateaudit down?
Welcome back Flanagan,
on again, off again, flan agan, hope you enjoyed your trip to Planet X
missed your off-world comments
BBC are saying that Catlin Muppeteers “completed their epic trek across the Arctic”!!!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8049403.stm
TonyB (04:36:16) :
“It is about time we were more proactive as a collective organisation of sceptics, instead of making our individual complaints within forums that agree with our own view point.
Can we develop the mechaniosm (without the right wing or BIg Oil connotations) whereby we despatch our own press releases- based on facts and science- and sent them to the thirty or so key media (many of the rest pick it up from these sources)
We are currently being marginalised by the media who believe what they are being told and rarely know the real facts.
Tonyb”
OK. Here is what we should all do. Every day.
Digg.com
Digg a post on WUWT. Maybe co-ordinated. (Maybe Anthony could put a link on each post to simplify this)
iComment.com
An empowering tool (for Firefox and IE) that allows you to comment on any webpage. Of course only other users of iComment can see those comments but the userbase is increasing daily (over 660,000 at last look).
Every day I put at least one on; The BBC, CNN, USA.gov, Sciencemag, Wikipedia etc.
It gives satisfaction and, surprise, surprise, the top 3 comments (half way down) the home page are sympathetic to our cause.
It is beyond time to get proactive.
Bob: I actually found the picture somewhere else – sorry not to have mentioned your blog.
Garrett: it obviously is your inner conspiracy theory: all the indicatirs show a now very rapidly decreasing sea ice – for example the JAXA you can see on the right panel of this very site.