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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Speaking of Snowball earth, if the majority of the water was frozen and that the planet was at about (some claim) -40 C, and at the temperature we can basically say that water vapour was a trace element in the atmosphere, how much CO2 would it takes to rise the temperature above 0 C, in order to trigger the Big Melt (according to their theory)?
I found this little gem of article from Dr. Hathaway http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/ast22jul99_1.htm
Were they more humble by the science at that time? What has changed? Here are few nice quotes:
Steven,
whenever you show the Vostok ice core data for CO2 and temperature, it is very instructive to also show the changing insolation pattern. This just makes it clear the bulk of the change from glacial to interglacial is driven by insolation, not by CO2.
Best Regards,
Tom
ClimateSanity
Sorry… here are the quotes:
“Although sunspots are cooler areas on the solar surface, the Sun is actually hotter when sunspots appear and cooler when they are absent. Scientists believe that a long period of solar inactivity may correspond with colder temperatures on Earth. From 1645 to 1715, astronomers observed very little solar activity. This time period coincides with an era known as the Little Ice Age, when rivers and lakes throughout Europe (and perhaps the world) froze.”
and
“We don’t understand well enough why the sun does this to be able to predict like a meteorologist does.”
storky (10:27:59) Flanagan (09:41:49) : and a few others
Will one of you folks that seem so distraught about the possibility of the Arctic Ocean having iceless patches or even ice free weeks explain what all the fuss is about? It is not like this hasn’t happened before. Then Earth did not tip into whatever you folks seem sure it will do this time.
Ice also acts as an insulator and open water will transfer energy to the atmosphere. I don’t know the numbers for this but hope you can provide estimates to global warming/cooling if there are variations in ice cover, say for zero ice, 15%, 33%, 50%, 75%, and 100%. I expect the % cover to vary by month but if you use a spreadsheet and post it for all of us to see as suggested by bill_tb:
“I note Steve is now doing everything in the open, I would encourage others to follow his lead. Software, methods, results, conclusions — make it all open.” (04:56:16)
I would be happy to help Lucy Skywalker with “Dummies Guide to (Climate) Science”. I am retired, have time and share her frustrations.
“”” Ray (15:13:12) :
Speaking of Snowball earth, if the majority of the water was frozen and that the planet was at about (some claim) -40 C, and at the temperature we can basically say that water vapour was a trace element in the atmosphere, how much CO2 would it takes to rise the temperature above 0 C, in order to trigger the Big Melt (according to their theory)? “””
Well that is an interesting mental exercise Ray; and one that I have often posed. Given that water vapor also absorbs a considerable amount of incoming solar energy starting around 750 nm, comprising about 20% of the total solar radiation, without water vapor you would have a huge radiative “forcing” (hate that word) due to extra ground level insolation about which CO2 can do nothing; so an atmosphere without water vapor; would give a whole lot more warming than CO2 ever could; and that warming would produce evaporation and eventually water vapor in the atmsopehre; even if there was not a jot of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Eventually youe would get clouds and precipitation which would lower the insolation and stop runaway heating, so a atable temperature would be reached.
It is also interesting to contemplate the opposite where the earth temperature rises to say 99 deg C, so you would have so much water vapor in the atmosphere you would have cloud cover all over the earth from the ground on up. Of course under those conditions, there would be no solar insolation reaching the surface, and with the high albedo, there isn’t enough incoming to maintain that temperature, so the ground must cool, which will start precipitation; it will rain and snow for 40 days and 40 nights, and pretty soon you would get breaks in the clouds, and sunlight could start to reach the ground and stop the whole place from freezing, and eventually a new stable temperature would be reached with a certain amount of cloud cover and water vapor.
So starting from either end of the temperature range; the earth would eventually reach a stable condition.
The big question is are those two stable conditions different or are they the same stable state. If they are two stable states, a hot state, and a cold state,t he region between them would be one of positive feedback instability, and if the eqaarth were in between, it would be driven by feedback to one or the other states.
Well actually you ould have multiple stable states instead of just two, and they would be separated by regions of positive and negative feedback, and the climate would gravitate to one or other of the nearest stable states.
So are we in the cold state now, so that “global warming could trigger us to transition to the hot state; or are we already in the hot state, and a little cooling could push us over the hump to a colder climate regime.
I’m not aware of any Physics which can explain multiple stable temperature states in our atmosphere; I believe the hot state and the cold state are one and the same; and there is no tripping point that can flip us to a Venus condition (given we have pretty much the present orbital parameters and solar constant). Of course major orbital or solar changes can change the conditions to something more drastic; but I believe we currently are in a stable feedback controlled temperature regime that is maintained by water vapor/cloud cover and the oceans.
So long as those things persist, we couldn’t change this planet’s temperature significantly even if we wanted to; and if we wanted to; where would you set the thermostat.
Things like CO2, aerosols, Volcanoes, cosmic rays, whatever, can produce minot perturbations of our climate; remember we already cover the gamut from -90C to +60 C thereabouts and all at the same time; so I don’t think a little temperature change is going to hurt anybody.
Predictions of ocean rise when the west Antarctic ice sheet all slides into the southern ocean one night; always seem to assume that evaporation and precipitation patterns won’t change one iota, and all that extra water will just pile up around the United States. The thought that you could get massive precipitation of ice and snow in other places just never seems to make it into the playstation models.
George
Interesting… NSIDC ice now showing a trend versus 2007
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png
(not parallel)
that is different to DMI
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icecover.uk.php
(parallel). Maybe my eyes are deciving me or
maybe different satellites/measurements etc.
“”” oms (10:49:40) :
George E. Smith (09:48:57) :
If ocean outgassing and uptake were a big factor, one can see that 100% of the ocean surface is in contact with the atmopshere, so outgassed CO2 goes immediately into the air; but the converse is not true, 100% of the atmosphere is not in contact with the oceans, so when the oceans start to uptake CO2 upon cooling, there is a propagation delay for a good bit of the atmosphere that is not directly in contact with the ocean; so the CO2 has to migrate to the ocean first, before it can dissolve.
You’re comparing apples to apple skins. The amount of the ocean volume in contact with the atmosphere over scales of a few years is certainly much less than 100%. “””
I do believe I said surface. I see land and water and atmosphere; and we were talking about CO2 exchange between the water and the atmosphere.
So we have water in contact with land over some mutual surface; water in contact with atmosphere over some mutual surface, and atmosphere in contact with land over some mutual surface.
Presumably CO2 exchanges occur across each of those three interfaces. The exchange between the oceans and the land across their common interface is not known to produce any greenhouse effect.
The CO2 exiting the ocean through the common surface with the atmosphere, all goes into the atmosphere. However CO2 in the atmosphere is exchanged between both the ocean and the land; so not all the excess CO2 in the atmosphere retuyrns to the oceans when conditions change, because the land also reacts with it; and CO2 over the land can’t dissolve in the oceans until it reaches their common interface.
In any case a lot of the CO2 in the oceans is sequestered there because of biological processes, and never returns to the atmosphere at least in the standard 30 year time base of climate studies. The CO2 exchanged between the oceans and the atmospheremust be near the ocean surface; because the higher solubility of CO2 in deeper colder waters creates a driving force feeding CO2 from the surface to deeper waters thus depleting the surface CO2 (to be replaced from the atmosphere).. So long as the ocean retains its vertical temperature gradient; it will rob CO2 from warmer surface waters; even without any biological uptake.
Science Journal now says the ANTArctic ice sheets will NOT melt as catastrophically as they hoped…er, thought. Lead author of West Antarctic study now claims melting will not cause sea level rise as predicted. And this from the BBC no less! In (fact) the sea level rise will only be half what the study claimed.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8050094.stm
More repositioning for the end of AGW at the mightiest of once-scientific levels.
I bet Pelosi will be stating that the Science Journal and Bush missled her on these facts. Tomorrow at noon, Antarctic Ice not melting as thought, Bush is to blame.
@ur momisugly John S. (12:26:21)
“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….”
Perhaps you are correct about feedback. My intuition says you aren’t.
I’m thinking about non-electronic examples of natural systems wherein small energy input changes result in large output changes and where some of the output can be applied in phase to the input. The system would need a third input – raw energy, of course – that would be the sun.
I haven’t come up with anything convincing yet, but I’ll wager there are a number of people here who can. Snowball earth is a possibility – as the oceans freeze, the earth’s albedo increases, accelerating the effect until we get the stable snowball. I’m not sure that qualifies as ‘feedback’, though.
Maybe ‘tipping point’ is a more useful concept for glacial cycles. Consider a semi-trailer a third full of gravel balanced on a central pivot. The location of the gravel corresponds to temperature. The changes are abrupt. What is driving the see-saw?
Global Warming is a fraud to push legislation for cap and trade policies which translate into very high taxes. They have convinced people the globe actually is warming.
George E. Smith (18:04:15) :
Presumably processes which occur over LONGER timescales than 30 years are the ones that show up in 30 year moving averages.
I think it would be safe to say that CO2 concentration equalizes more easily in the atmosphere than in the ocean.
Molecular diffusion processes in the ocean are much slower (for almost any tracer) than turbulent mixing and circulation (one of your own subjects of interest).
” MattN (03:08:27) : “..Gavin doesn’t police for decorum. – Anthony” ”
I didn’t know that. A lot of people didn’t know that since not many visit there.
” Steven Goddard (11:36:25) :..looks like someone at the BBC is reading WUWT. ”
They can handle the truth?
2009 showing divergence (in this data set) from 2008. Alarmists must be feeling uncomfortable about their Arctic ice predictions.
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icecover.uk.php
VG,
The NSIDC does show 2009 converging on 2007 as of May 13:
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/daily.html
While JAXA shows the two years parallel:
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
Has NSIDC now become an out and out outlier?
” Mike Bryant (20:39:06) : While JAXA shows the two years parallel:”
JAXA shows divergence. Look again :
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
Have a look at NSIDC data for the Southern Hemisphere!
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images//daily_images/S_timeseries.png
(I know this is an OT from Northern Hemisphere ice, sorry, but it is interesting!)
“(I know this is an OT from Northern Hemisphere ice…”
Opps, should have said Arctic temperature
“It is also interesting to contemplate the opposite where the earth temperature rises to say 99 deg C, so you would have so much water vapor in the atmosphere you would have cloud cover all over the earth from the ground on up”
99 deg C, a very hot sauna. You don’t get clouds at that temperature just water vapour, a colourless odourless gas.
Couldn’t find anywhere sensible to post this, so this seems as relevant as anywhere.
Your favourite Keystone Cops of the Arctic Circle, the Catlin Crew, have obtained some good publicity for their crusade, I mean research expedition.
Apparently the ice is thinner than expected. Go figure. What Pen Hadow doesn’t say is how thin he expected it to be so his statements remain a little ambiguous.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthpicturegalleries/5323888/The-Catlin-Arctic-Survey-led-by-Pen-Hadow-finds-the-polar-ice-cap-is-thinner.html
At the risk of being labelled a spammer, more here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/globalwarming/5321067/Pen-Hadow-climate-change-trek-finds-thin-ice.html
Western Antarctic was ice-free during interglacials – Geological data signal dynamic developments of the ice shield three to five million years ago
http://www.awi.de/en/news/press_releases/detail/item/andrill/?cHash=0296c43087
But its never been hotter than now, ever…