While we are on the subject of the APS and their consideration of their stance on climate, this statement came to me today via Philip Bratby in comments. I thought it presicent and worthwhile sharing, since once again there is great concern in the alarmosphere about the levels of Arctic sea ice this summer.
‘It will, without doubt, have come to your Lordship’s knowledge that a considerable change of climate, inexplicable at present to us, must have taken place in the Circumpolar Regions, by which the severity of the cold that has for centuries past enclosed the seas in the high northern latitudes in an impenetrable barrier of ice, has been during the last two years greatly abated. This affords ample proof that new sources of warmth have been opened, and give us leave to hope that the Arctic Seas may at this time be more accessible than they have been for centuries past, and that discoveries may now be made in them, not only interesting to the advancement of science, but also to the future intercourse of mankind and the commerce of distant nations.’
President of the Royal Society, London, to the Admiralty, 20th November, 1817, Minutes of Council, Volume 8. pp.149-153, Royal Society, London. 20th November, 1817.(from) http://www.john-daly.com/polar/arctic.htm
If that quote seems familiar to you, it is because it was previously published here on WUWT as part of a larger article on Historic Variation in Arctic Sea Ice.
That quote was also in a letter sent to the current president of the Royal Society, Lord Rees, on 18 July 2009.
The full text of the letter penned by R.C.E. Wyndham to Lord Rees is available here as a PDF. While I do not agree with some things said in the letter, it is worth a read for the humorous writing style. I doubt very much that Lord Rees will respond.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
matt v. (07:31:27) :Obviously you have not read the document, as this reproduces the following:
‘It will, without doubt, have come to your Lordship’s knowledge that a considerable change of climate, inexplicable at present
to us, must have taken place in the Circumpolar Regions, by which the severity of the cold that has for centuries past enclosed
the seas in the high northern latitudes in an impenetrable barrier of ice, has been during the last two years greatly abated. This
affords ample proof that new sources of warmth have been opened, and give us leave to hope that the Arctic Seas may at this
time be more accessible than they have been for centuries past, and that discoveries may now be made in them, not only
interesting to the advancement of science, but also to the future intercourse of mankind and the commerce of distant nations.’
The statement was made on 20 November 1817 to their Lordships of the Admiralty
snip – I will not have you changing handles, stick with one, especially one that is not this one. – Anthony
I strongly recommend that everyone read Chapter 2 of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) report: http://www.acia.uaf.edu/PDFs/ACIA_Science_Chapters_Final/ACIA_Ch02_Final.pdf.
(if the link does not work google “ACIA Arctic”).
This gives a fascinating historical overview of the Arctic Climate over geological time scales. However, the most interesting period to me (and I would think to all of us deniers) is the Holocene – approximately the past 11,000 years during which the Arctic has experienced higher and lower temperatures than present, higher rates of warming, tree lines many hundreds of Kms closer to the pole etc. etc. Read this and you will be hard pressed to believe that there is any real Arctic evidence for AGW (although, politically correctly enough, the ACIA still talks at length about AGW in other chapters of the report and is clearly a ‘believer’, it is unable to demonstrate convincing evidence)
Interestingly, the IPCC in FAR says of the ACIA report that it “has substantially improved the understanding of the impacts of climate change in the Arctic, is a benchmark for regional impact assessments, and may become the basis for a sustainable management plan for the Arctic”. See Chapter 15 of Working Group II’s report to the FAR.
output geoengineering climatic required indicate figure [url=http://www.kirotv.com]overwhelming end decreases trends[/url] http://hughesnet.com
The primary way that ice sheets build to sizes greater than the historic mean over long periods is lack of summer melt. This is true for every kind of ice: sheets, land, and sea. Summer temps are controlled by ocean temps. Colder waters bring cooler summers. There is speculation that these colder waters came from warmer waters, as in sudden ice melt in warm waters that recharged a string of long lasting La Nina’s. Others say that it is a re-energized trade wind that stays around for a long time that does it. Regardless, in order for sustained ice growth, you can’t have hot summers.
Per arctic ice melt in summer, in my comment in the GISS Step1 thread:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/07/22/giss-step-1-does-it-influence-the-trend/#comment-164738
I pointed out that I’d made a benchmark for measuring GIStemp by doing summations of “global temperature” in the GHCN data (unadorned) and comparing those to the summations of the same data post GIStemp additions and modifications. One of the sidebar issues it showed up was that “Global Warming” happens substantially only in winter, per the data.
(Clever stuff, this CO2, only causing warming in winter months! Wonder how it does that?…)
So the “summer melt” of the arctic can’t be due to the “higher summer temperatures” in the data… since the summers are not warmer…
An excerpt from the other comment:
First up, the “GLOBAL” temperature shows a pronounced seasonal trend. This is a record from after STEP1, just before the zonalizing:
GAT in year : 1971 3.60 6.20 8.20 12.90 16.50 19.30 20.90 20.70 17.90 13.90 9.50 5.60 14.10
The first number is the year, then 12 monthly averages, then the final number is the global average (for the whole year). […]
It seems a bit “odd” to me that the “Globe” would be 17C colder in January than it is in July. Does it not have hemispheres that balance each other out? In fairness, the sea temps are added in in STEP4_5 and the SH is mostly sea. But it’s pretty clear that the “Global” record is not very global at the half way point in GIStemp.
Next (record below) is from GHCN, (the second record below)to GHCN with added (Antarctic, Hohenp…., etc.) and with the pre 1880’s tossed out and the first round of the Reference Station Method. The third record is as the data leaves STEP1 with it’s magic sauce. These are the total of all years in the data set. (i.e. the naive case of just averaging all data)
Average of all data for a given month in the GHCN data as processed
Last field, far right, is average of all months averages (GAT over all time):
2.6 3.9 7.3 11.8 15.8 18.9 20.7 20.3 17.4 13.1 7.9 3.9 11.97
2.6 3.8 7.3 11.7 15.6 18.7 20.5 20.0 17.2 13.0 7.9 3.9 11.85
3.2 4.5 7.9 12.1 15.9 19.0 20.9 20.5 17.7 13.5 8.5 4.5 12.35
It is pretty clear from inspection of these three that the temperature is raised by GIStemp. It’s also pretty clear that STEP0 does not do much of it (in fact, some data points go down – Adding the Antarctic can do that!). The “cooking” only really starts with STEP1.
The big surprise for me was not the 0.38 C rise in the Total GAT (far right) but the way that winters get warmed up! July and August hardly change (0.2 and 0.3 respectively) yet January has a full 0.6 C rise as do November, December, Febrary, and March.
GIStemp induces more change in the winter data than in the summer.
Then I looked at changes in temperatures over the years:
YEAR – 12 monthly averages of all temperature data in set – GAT for year.
1776 -1.4 2.3 4.2 7.2 12.1 18.2 19.7 19.3 15.6 9.5 3.0 -0.4 9.89
1881 3.5 4.1 6.4 10.9 15.3 18.2 20.2 19.8 17.2 11.8 6.4 3.4 11.43
1971 3.6 6.2 8.2 12.9 16.5 19.3 20.9 20.7 17.9 13.9 9.5 5.6 14.10
2008 8.3 8.3 11.1 14.6 17.6 19.9 20.9 20.9 18.8 15.5 11.0 8.8 15.90
So take a look at the January column. 9.7 C of rise. July: 1.2C.
December: 9.2C while August is 1.6C.
Somehow all the “warming” in the data is concentrated into the winter months. Our “Global Warming”, per the data, is really “Global warmer winters with consistent nice summers”… At least, that’s what’s in the data.
IMHO, this is a major issue for the CO2 thesis. Why is it not doing anything in summer?
In the comment after that one I speculated that perhaps it’s the result of adding thermometers to the Southern Hemisphere in the 1800’s and then removing them from Siberia at the end of the USSR.
E.M.Smith (03:59:22) :
Hmmm…. A bit further pondering…. […]
Could GW all just be where in the world is Carmen Sandiego’s Thermometer?
😎
And I would remind folks:
“Averages hide more than they reveal. -emsmith”
So perhaps this is why Hansen et al don’t want to look at the monthly GAT, but just at The One True Number: The Annual Global Average Temperature.
If the data, and these averages, are to be believed, then “summer melt” is not due to higher temps, and any reduction in arctic cover is more due to warmer winters and ocean / wind currents.
BTW, I would speculate that the tendency of GIStemp to raise the values of the fields with the most range (cold months) more than those with less range (warm months) argues for a systematic failure that amplifies any differences in the data…
I was looking to see when the Port of Churchill was due to open, Which I cannot confirm yet, but I ran into the the July 26th Canadian Ice Service sea ice charts for Hudson’s Bay and there seems to be a rather larger discrepancy between NSIDC and the Canadian Ice Service. Now I am going through the back years to see if this is common due to methodology.
I posted the same day images on my site as a place holder while I gather the data. Does anyone know if this has been done anywhere so I could reference it?
Canada has also outlined its Strengthened Arctic Strategy recently Canada Arctic Strategy Announced It includes a Defense and Economic Plan, also a statement of Sovereignty over the Arctic Region.
Your Lordship should take into account the absurdity of global warmers allegation, as to affirm that our atmosphere is capable of containing such a big amount of energy, as the volumetric heat capacity of the atmosphere, being with or without that trace gas which we all exhale and plants enjoy breathing is (in British thermal unit th per gallon -Imperial- degree Fahrenheit) 0.003106853 Btuth gal-1 oF-1 while that of water is 10.02721 Btu th gal-1 oF-1, so this being 3227.4491261736554642269846690526 times than that of the Air, at sea level pressure.
So by no means it is possible for the gas mix of the atmosphere to hold enough heat in it, as thou lordship has for sure experienced when being in the desert or when being at an eclipse of the sun.
See the following paper for the source of my thoughts on “improved resolution” and other issues that I think contaminate the mean and make current ice area and extent not readily compared to the mean.
https://abstracts.congrex.com/scripts/jmevent/abstracts/FCXNL-09A02a-1663927-1-SeaIceRemoteSensing_WhitePaper.pdf
John Wright (07:30:03) :
In response to John Finn. Go visit Piers Corbyn’s site http://www.weatheraction.com
Why? Most of Piers stuff is nonsense.
Greenpeace may be trying to get through combined and compacted first year ice, and multi-year ice they think are bergs. The wind pattern would suggest that all levels of sea ice are being compacted into the Arctic, as well as ice bergs from land, saving lots of 1st year ice from melting further South but making it look like it is. It isn’t leaving the Arctic, it is going further into the Arctic.
related but OT. I usually check the NSIDC to look at both the Arctic & Antarctic Sea Ice Extent. I find today that I can access the Arctic http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png but not the Antarctic http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_timeseries.png. The Antarctic .png requests a userID PW authentication.
Wonder what gives?
Great letter!
But who is R.C.E. Wyndham ?
LOL, now it’s back to normal display. Must have been a hiccup in the Apache server.
Summer melt happens to a larger degree when wind sends ice out of the Arctic to warmer temps both in the air and underneath. Winter ice can rebuild to normal levels and then slip below average during the summer because of this pattern. There are also currents in the Arctic that can start and stop, and turn cool or warm based on what is happening in the PDO and AMO. Still, if you want normal to below normal cold winter temps to build up ice, you have to have less and less summer melt.
rbateman (06:09:49) :
John Finn (04:07:03) :
That would be the a portion of the crazy way it works. A slighty warmer Arctic may let a few ships through in the Northwest Passage, but the Arctic is still a frozen inhospitable wasteland.
Well that isn’t the way it worked between 1910-1940, 1940-1975 and 1975 to date. In each of those periods when the earth was warming the arctic warmed 4 times as much as anywhere else and when it was cooling the arctic was cooled 4 times as much as anywhere else.
Where did the cold go? South. Made life miserable for many, taking huge chunks out of regional agricultural productivity. If it weren’t for trade, Europe would have starved.
CET shows plenty of periods that were just as cold as the Dalton Minimum – so does DeBilt. Uppsala shows a cooling trend which started after the Dalton Minimum. Crop failure and starvation were not unique to the early 19th century.
pyromancer76 (07:54:01) : One important point that I wish everyone would remember about Category 5 Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans: the damage was manageable until the levees gave way. Why did they give way? Because the Army Corps of Engineers did not build them to “code” (the required strength).
Just a minor point of clarification: The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed a Cat 5 rated levee system decades ago (about the Kennedy / Johnson years, IIRC) and it was congress who decided that a Cat 3 levee was what they could “afford”. The Corps can only build what the congress funds them to build…
In later years (Clinton era, I think) New Orleans was alloted money for levee repairs, that they chose to redirect to other “social programs”.
The problems with the N.O. Levees are directly the responsibility of the politicians making very bad funding decisions. The Corps is ready, willing, and able to make any strength levee system you want to pay for…
Regarding New Orleans, an engineer exploring the materials that were being used to repair and strengthen the levees stated: Still not up to “code”. “It” will happen again — and again the worst damage will not be caused by a hurricane. But catastrophists want to tell untruths.
Yes, but it’s not a “poor materials” issue, it’s a “rebuilding to Cat 3 strength” decision. Once again the Corps said “we can make it a Cat 5 system” and they were TOLD “Repair it to Cat 3 strength. We’ll get back to you on that Cat 5 money question.”…
When you order raw eggs, don’t blame the cook for undercooking them…
“Eighteen hundred and froze to death” was 1816, the year before that was written….interesting.
@ur momisugly Don S. (08:09:13):
I dislike analogy but, yes, it may be a war. But, in war, it’s foolish to mount an all out frontal attack when your opponent has overwhelming strength (in this case, the scientific establishment, the MSM and the politicians). No, the best way is a combination of guile (working underground – e.g. using the internet – to influence established opinion, bringing key people over to your side), building the confidence of the local population (i.e. the general public – showing them it’s respectable to hold sceptical views) and, as in the present case, well-directed powerful weapons such as soberly argued letters (= roadside bombs?) that can be deployed at minimum risk.
MattN (09:11:16) : Yes, volcanoes can cause sudden and dramatic but transient cooling, can’t they? Shame that we have no global thermometer record going back that far…Still, one would think it would take longer than a year for the post Tambora recovery to set in-which again shows just how dramatic regional variations can be!
The first person to bring the letter to the Admiralty by the Royal Society to the attention of climatologists was Cynthia Wilson in an article titled, “The Little Ice Age on Eastern Hudson/James Bay: The Summer Weather and Climate at Great WHale, Fort George and Eastmain, 1814 to 1821, as Derived from Hudson’s Bay Company Records.” published in Syllogeus 55, Climatic Change in Canada 5. Critical Periods in the Quaternary Climatic History of Northern North America. editor C.R Harington. I put the quote on the internet through John Daly’s website and it has proliferated from there.
The Climatic Change in Canada series was published by the National Museum of Canada and produced the articles presented by many scientists around topics at a series of annual conferences held in Ottawa Canada. The entire project was organized by Dr. Harington under the title, “National Museum of Natural Sciences Project on Climatic Change in Canada During the Past 20,000 years.”
One major conference in this series that I helped organize with Dr Harington and Cynthia Wilson in 1992 was a specific examination of “The Year Without a Summer?: World Climate in 1816”. The proceedings were edited by C.R.Harington and are still available from the Canadian Museum of Nature.
When we planned the conference we realized global temperatures were already dropping at the end of the 18th century and there was a coincidence with the Dalton Minimum. I was able to convince my colleagues that it was necessary to put the singular year in the broader context, hence most of the papers presented are more than an examination of that specific year. In addition, I was aware of the growing interest in the relationship between sunspot activity and global temperatures triggered earlier by John Eddy’s publication “The Case of the Missing Sunspots” in “Scientific American” in 1977. I had already identified the relationship between drought cycles and the 22 year sunspot cycle in my doctoral work and experienced the resistance to new information. I ran the risk of failing the defense of my thesis because the examining committee argued for its removal and I fought for its inclusion. It remained. As a result we invited John Eddy to be the keynote speaker. Unfortunately, he was unable to attend but did provide the keynote paper titled “Before Tambora: The Sun and Climate, 1790-1830.”
A second important component of the conference was a half day workshop I proposed and organized with the help of Cynthia Wilson. We printed up very large blank maps of the world and asked all participants to put on the map their assessment of the temperature and precipitation conditions for their area of study. We did this by having categories labelled from ++ for very hot through to — for very cold and (++) for very wet to (–) for very dry. The final map was then organized and summarized by Wilson and is included in the proceedings publication.
The summary is an extensive review of all the findings presented in the individual papers and gives as comprehensive a view as is known of global weather conditions for 1816. It is clear that as Wilson notes, “The evidence suggest that in the Northern Hemisphere, the general circulation was marked in summer by a few preferred, persistent, large scale flow patterns at the 500-mb (50kPa) level, whose stalled surface systems dominated the weather for protracted periods.” In other words there was a dramatic increase in amplitude of the Jet Stream that caused blocking of the normal west to east migration of the Rossby Waves. This resulted in an increase in duration of the average 4 to 6 week pattern of weather in the middle and higher latitudes so weather patterns persisted for most of the summer. It also meant a significant shift in the wind patterns with an increase of northerly and southerly winds as the wave amplitude increased. Based on what we saw with the impact of wind and ocean current patterns on sea ice as identified by NASA for 2007
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/quikscat-20071001.html
it is undoubtedly this that caused the ice shifts reported to the Admiralty in the Royal Society letter. As a matter of interest the letter was proposed and recorded in the Minutes of the Royal Society but I understand was never sent.
Finally we held these annual conferences for several years at the Canadian Museum with a different area of focus within the Quaternary each year. Specialist from paleogeology, paleoclimate, dendrochronology, dendroclimatology, glaciology, palynology, and several other areas derived a great deal because often a problem confronting one area had already been resolved in another, but because of the narrowness of specialization in the generalist study of climatology they did not read other specialists literature.
I was elected president for the last year of the conferences. Within months the portion of the funding provided by Environment Canada was canceled because they decided global warming was the issue and some of the participants at the conferences, including myself, were already expressing reservations about the science of the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory. Of course, we were a threat if only because we knew how quickly and how much climate changes in short time periods – something in itself sufficient to undermine the AGW claims. It was my first major experience with the interference of politics into the scientific climate debate.
Sadly, I have watched over the years as others have gradually reached the point of understanding we were at twenty years ago, although actually many still have a long way to go. I recommend people go back and read the proceedings to learn how far along the trail we were of at least identifying the problems just now getting attention, but even then this attention is only from those who are still snidely labeled skeptics or deniers.
The previously published article here on WUWT : “Historic Variation in Arctic Sea Ice” cited a new book at: http://www.arctic-heats-up.com/ discussing the Arctic Warming from 1919 to 1940 that was already regarded as a problem back in 1938 according the following abstract :
>>In recent years attention is being directed more and more towards a problem which may possibly prove of great significance in human affairs, the rise of temperatures in the northern hemisphere, and especially in the arctic regions. >> ( Brooks, C.E.P., “The Warming Arctic”, The Meteorological Magazine, 1938, p.29-32.);
and that recent paper relate the early Arctic warming in the 1920s partly or primarily to:
· natural variability in the weather system;
· atmospheric variability or “climate noise”;
· natural fluctuations internal to the climate system;
· considerable internal variations;
· feedbacks internal to the climate system.
http://www.arctic-heats-up.com/chapter_6.html , Ch.6, Cc), although the C.E.P Brooks article already mentioned:
__The Spitsbergen branch of the North Atlantic
Current has greatly increased in strength and the
surface layer of cold water in the Arctic Ocean
has decreased from 200 to 100 metres thickness.
__Attributing the recent period of warm winters to
an increase in the strength of the atmospheric
circulation only pushes the problem one stage
further back, for we should still have to account
for the change in circulation.
__Moreover, it is almost equally plausible to
regard the change of circulation as a result of
the warming of the Arctic, for open ice
conditions in the Arctic Ocean are favorable to
the formation of depression.
__More probably the increased circulation is both
cause and effect of the warmed Arctic.
While it might be difficult to assess the situation back in 1817 it should be possible with regard to what happened 90 years ago, which seems to corresponds approximately with the conclusion of the book.
@Joseph “…Why is the data from satellites not used for this debate?…”
Because it diverges from the only true oracle, which is GISS….
I also wrote to Lord Rees recently telling him that The Royal Society’s proud claim of “350 years of excellence in science” would soon ring very hollow indeed if he didn’t open his eyes and actually look at the science of climate change.
It is fascinating to learn that the President 190 years ago was equally misguided.
Come to think of it I seem to remember that Robert Hooke (another early President of the Royal Society) dealt rather shamefully with Harrison’s work on longitude.
It warrants a bit of research. Perhaps a blinkered conservatism goes with the job and the Royal Society has always been a good friend to bad science
I worked “up north” in the summer of 1973 – did a DEW Line tour and my job had me flying back and forth along the Line from Alaska to Greenland. I took hundreds of pictures out the window of the F227 on the Laterals and there was much open water. I remember thinking “What happens if we have an engine problem right now”.
The polar ice sheet expands a bit & then shrinks a bit, so no worries, no hysteria needed. Except if you are trying to fool and/or scare people into making donations to their Organizations so they can “Save the XXXXXXXX”.