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
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Brian in Alaska… Muktuk has been found to be a good source of vitamin C containing up to 38 mg/100g. Who need oranges with that sort of concentration in vitamin C?
Peter,
Thanks for the link – looks like someone at the BBC is reading WUWT.
Brian in Alaska… do they say there: “a muktuk a day keeps the doctor away?
Henry Galt 09 37 45
Thanks for your great reply to my (04:36:16) when I wrote:
“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 mechanism (without the right wing or BIg Oil connotations) whereby we despatch our own press releases- based on facts and science- and send 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. ”
Obviously some people -such as Henry and Smokey-agree with my sentiments, but despite the great efforts of this blog our message is not being widely, consistently and frequently heard in the media.
I know Christopher Booker of the UK Daily Telegraph sometimes drops by, but for every journalist like him there are a hundred media that just believe what they are being told in press releases. I have posted a link to the numerous reports in the UK today about the huge Catlin survey ‘success’. We need to counter this sort of thing.
Comments from other people would be welcomed. As Henry says;
“It is beyond time to get proactive”.
Tonyb
“Alaska’s Hubbard Glacier is advancing at the rate of seven feet per day!” http://www.cdapress.com/articles/2009/05/11/columns/columns06.prt
According to my doomsday model, which uses the same sort of linear extrapolation based on only a few years of observations showing a positive slope, Hubbard Glacier might run into Hawaii in about 2 million years. Maybe we should start moving them away right now…
OK, Elves (Santa type) make Arctic warming (everyone knows that because at Elf school we all learned that -50°C with a 1°C anomaly comes to … -49°C), the Catlin expedition was science, the Arctic will be gone in five years and we will all surely die of “global warming” if we don’t build an Ark.
Oh yea, I remember… positive feedbacks only apply to future man made warming not to past or even present warming. Now where did I leave that Mid Tropospheric Warming Anomaly? Oh.. there it is right next to Big Al’s Vostok Ice Core graph being dried out by the hidden heat being radiated from The Hansen Deep Ocean …
Unicorns will once again gallop on fields of Green … hopefully not breaking their necks while tripping over that grade one North American surface monitoring network that clearly illustrates 0.6/Century warming (+/- 0.001C) ..
.
Data for sale … get your data …. models… I’m giving them away … Mannomatics.. black is white … Government Grant futures .. your children will live in paradise at these prices … Carbon Tax .. Carbon Tax… Get your Carbon Tax refund … closing down sale .. everything has to go …
George E. Smith:
Always good to see someone cite their sources!
A little off topic but I sitting in Munich right now and of course have limited US media options. On the BBC tonight it broadcast (orgy) live the pick up of the nuts (my opinion only) of the Catlin group attempting to reach the North Pole and along the way doing “important” data gathering. Per the broadcast quote “all artic ice will be gone in 20-30 years” which will break Al’s heart and there was “no snow”. Of course it mentioned the frost bite and rationing of food due to poor weather condition. (How would have thought this time of year?”) Of course they were surprised at how thin the ice was (ironically from reading this site the ice expanse is larger and thicker than originally thought. The BBC broadcast “we had to carrry extra gas to pick the explorers up due to large cracks in the ice which forced the explorers to abandon their quest” and “that should answer a question at the roof of the world – how long the ice has left”.
The basic unsolved question is through what mechanisms does the Earth flip in and out of ice ages. This question will never be convincingly answered by would-be climate scientists who harbor misguided, unquantified notions of “feedback.”
Feedback in any scientific/analytic sense (i.e., the return of the system output signal for algebraic addition to the input) is even more difficult to find in the climate system than muktuk in Barrow last April. This abuse of this concept in “climate science” is staggering. Climate operates as a feed-through system, with SW insolation as input and planetary LW radiation as output. There simply are no operational amplifiers in the system to effect any increase in power as is implied by “positive feedback,” or any diminution of the input–“negative feedback.” There’s only spatial and temporal redistribution of the thermal energy produced by insolation. All else is an empty conceit.
Jeff Id (23:22:53) :
This is interesting, I suppose after spending so much time looking at the Antarctic, this is the next logical step. The lack of warming is a surprise, the fourth figure from the top is interesting too because of it’s length.
The link http://data.giss.nasa.gov/work/gistemp/STATIONS//tmp.431042500000.1.1/station.gif
Isn’t working for me.
I’ve completed a summary of the Antarctic reconstructions for those who are interested.
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/05/14/antarcti-summary-part-1-a-trend-of-trends/
Between a group of us, we’ve completed nearly a hundred different reconstructions using Steig’s methods with modifications. Guess which has the highest warming trend?”
Jeff,
Great job, well done.
The same is true of the arctic. Once the ice goes, the temperature will rocket upward.
Very thoughtful quote. The Catlin crew were early victims of some of those “rocketing” -50C temperatures.
hunter (11:00:12) :
“storky,
Tell your experiment to the IPCC, Hansen, Gore, the WWF, etc.
They are the ones who think the temps are skyrocketing now”.
hunter,
A small correction please: They want to make us believe the temps are skyrocketing now. Non of them believe their own bogus.
Storky, ol’body. You decided to join the sensible minds at WUWT? For those of you that don’t know storky, he is a faith follower and defender of RealClimate.Org.
You might have had a point with your little experiment if the temperature at the maximum of the plot (i.e. above melt) was higherthan the average and increasing year after year. But it is not the case, so I guess it is not over heating like your climate appologists want you to beleive.
Peter Plail (10:49:42) :
Almost unelievable – or are the BBC reacting to yesterday’s complaints?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/climatechange/2009/05/catlin_arctic_survey_success.html
Going to the Pole this time of the year is a bit stupid and you put a lot of people’s lives at risk.’
…
Hmmm That comment refers to hadows 2003 expedition (follow the link in the blog). The worrding in the blog leaves a lot to be desired on this point and clearly implies the catlin expedition was at the receiving end of that comment.
Ray old P.A.L.,
Faith follower? RealClimate?
Limit your discussion to things you do know . . . oh, never mind . . . you’d be left with nothing to talk about.
When we discuss GLOBAL temperature rise, that refers to the aggregate of tens-of-thousands of readings from around the globe. One can find individual locations that buck the warming trend, but because the aggregate is rising, wherever those exist, somewhere else much higher temperature compensates significantly for the renegade value.
Now, Mr Goddard, I was with you right to the point where you blame Manchester United for MMGW. My model demonstrates quite clearly that Champions League victories over Italian and Spanish teams in finals cause warming and not MU success per se. My model does however project that negative Arctic ice extent is clearly due to anything involving Liverpool.
Mike Bryant (11:04:01)
I’d say that webcam pretty much confirms what the muktuk lover said. Thanks for the link.
Ray (11:34:52)
I don’t care if muktuk is high in vitamin C and Bombay Sapphire, I ain’t eating it.
As many articles and publications like this debunk warmist semi science based propaganda.
Hans Schreuder once again takes a frontal attack on the Greenhouse concept and the role of water vapor and CO2.
Here you can download his latest report from May 13th, stating that the sun heats the land and our oceans and the land and the oceans heat our atmosphere, not the other way around as a PDF.
http://ilovecarbondioxide.com/2009/05/sun-heats-earth-earth-heats-atmosphere.html
In atmospheric terms the “heat” would have to be turned up quite a lot to turn -50 into 0+. Perhaps what we are looking for here involves pouring
“hot” liquid onto the ice (or at least under it). There was a very nice Arctic video posted here some weeks ago. I can’t find it ATM but I’m sure someone will be along with the link soon.
2X3,
“Perhaps what we are looking for here involves pouring ‘hot’ liquid onto the ice (or at least under it).”
As you noted, it’s not atmospheric heat, but warm oceanic currents that are working their way through the ice caps.
Ray (11:50:30) :
According to my doomsday model, which uses the same sort of linear extrapolation based on only a few years of observations showing a positive slope, Hubbard Glacier might run into Hawaii in about 2 million years. Maybe we should start moving them away right now…
Ray, I’m really disappointed in you. You clearly haven’t accounted for the positive feedback of holes in the ozone layer resulting in increased UV, which in turn causes the ice to increase due to inverse thermodynamics. Nor have you accounted for the forcing due to reduced albedo. Now, go start running your model, adjusting parameters and data until you can demonstrate that we may, possibly, potentially be facing a Snowball Earth by 2100, with a tipping point in 5 years.
;^)
3×2,
So how come global temperatures have been going down since Beckham left?
John S. (12:26:21)
Thank you for putting that so well. That about sums up the conclusion we came to while discussing the whole climate business with a colleague yesterday.
Ref. Tony B and Lucy Skywalker
I’ve been visiting this blog for just under a year and during this time there has been posted, much information from many knowledgeable people in the science arena, clearly and explicitly disproving AGW. Surely with all this accumulated science it is time to ‘get the message out’ to a public who are being mislead into supporting actions that are not necessary and caused to worry about things that are plainly untrue.
This blog is a focus for the promotion of good science gathering but all I see ‘outside’ this place is blinkered science falsehoods being institutionally enforced by governments and the mass media of tv and newspapers with a few lone ‘deniers’ being treated as isolated extremists.
Is it time to publicly attempt to counteract this debarkle?
Some suggestions…donations from people here into a central advertising fund to promote printed posters in places such as newspapers local and national (cost!), public buildings such as libraries and work places. Downloadable window graphics. Tee-shirt promo’s. Online signed petitions promoted and sent to appropriate media organisations. Concise, counteracting, easy-to-understand documentation to give out to our own personal contacts. I promote this blog to all people I come in contact with. This is a good but slow process.
I’m sure there are others here who can come up with good promo ideas that we could all support and be involved with.
Surely, if we know or believe AGW is bad science or even a hoax and people are being tricked, en masse, we should be doing something about it now!
John W. (14:21:39) :
Oh, Sorry John W., I forgot to include my error bars. So, let’s say 2 million years plus-or-minus 800 million years… just to make sure I can claim that my model includes past, present and future climate events.