What sudden recent warming? What Hockey Stick? I don’t see any.
By Lucy Skywalker Green World Trust
with thanks to the late John Daly and his timeless, brilliant website page “What the Stations Say” (click on Arctic map above). Click on each thumbnail graph to access Daly’s full size graph with time and temperature scales and other details. The thicker dark horizontal line across some of these thumbnails indicated 0ºC (a few of the graphs are ALL under that line). The Arctic is shown in the condition of summer sea ice (see thumbnail below) and the pale circle is the Arctic Circle. All data comes from NASA GISS or CRU originally.
Paul Vaughan notes at WUWT that he “spent a fair amount of time updating these graphs (& others of Daly’s for other regions)” using http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/ and adds a cautionary note: The time-frame and aspect-ratio of the timeplots can be manipulated to create the illusion of a steep trend in recent years.
The highly variable temperatures and amounts of sea ice in both polar regions is well-known to locals, but cherrypicked extremes have become a media weapon to scare ignorant folk with. Greenlanders today are aware of recent warming; but history, archaeology, and the Norse sagas show that Greenland was warmer than today in the Middle Ages, when crops and trees were grown there. For recent sea ice changes (since 1979) see Cryosphere Today and note that while Northern Hemisphere sea ice (at the top of the CT page) has gone down recently (but is currently going up again), Southern Hemisphere sea ice (at the bottom of the CT page) is going up, so that the overall total is pretty constant although fluctuating between summer and winter.
Finally, Jeff Id’s superb animation of recent Arctic sea ice>>
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Thanks for verifying that, Anthony! It looks like a pretty busy airport for such a remote place, too: “For the 12-month period ending January 1, 2006, the airport had 11,750 aircraft operations, an average of 32 per day: ” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiley_Post-Will_Rogers_Memorial_Airport)
I wonder if there exists any long-running arctic station with reliable data that shows higher temperatures for the 90s/00s than for the 30s and 40s?
Espen (22:25:02) “Have a look for yourself:
Combined GISS data: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=633062600003&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
Homogeneity adjustment adds a trend to the older data:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=633062600003&data_set=2&num_neighbors=1 “
That’s pretty serious contrast.
Lucy, don’t pay too much attention to Foster (aka Tamino). He is the equivalent of a Party hack. The forum only allows cheerleaders for him and the rest of the Hockey Team. No criticism of any work produced by the team is tolerated. All critics end up banned. Lucia, a better applied mathematician by far, and a balanced person and objective thinker, is only the latest to be banned.
You cannot rely on his statistics either. He is a reasonably competent applied mathematician, but he uses this to bamboozle. The classic example of this was in his series on PCA and the Hockey Stick. Read the last item in the series, and shake your head in amazement at how anyone who actually understands PCA could do this. Also read the remarks from Ian Joliffe about how his position has been totally misrepresented.
And all this was in defense of th MBH Hockey Stick, a lost cause if ever there was one, and one that is immaterial to the total theory by the admission of the theory’s own advocates. So why exactly does it have to be defended in every last detail to the bitter end? Because Mann is on the team, and Party dogma is one and indivisible, you buy it all or you are a heretic.
All that will happen on OpenMind is that you will come in for personal abuse of a wholly irrelevant sort, suggestions about your funding (as if funding by George Soros was somehow from the Angels). OpenMind is basically a waste of time if climate is your concern. Its denizens are not people who are thinking about climate, but are people for whom personal abuse on internet forums is an important source of emotional release. In this I would include Foster himself, who colludes where he does not participate.
You might wonder why Foster bans critical comments, and wonder does he not realize that this makes his blog boring and lowers readership. The answer is that its not boring to him, and he is not interested in readership. What he wants, and what he gets, is a chorus of people spouting personal abuse following his leadership. He likes it. Weird but true. We however don’t have to go anywhere near it, and should simply ignore him and his crew.
So, post one response for anyone who may be interested, and then move on.
By the way, your main point is right. Natural variation over the centuries is the real question about both ice cover and temperatures in the Arctic. We know enough to be skeptical about the apocalypse, but not enough to be certain either way about the exceptionality of recent trends. This is the rational and balanced view of the facts and observations we have. But such positions do not lend themselves to generating personal abuse, so they will never find a voice on OpenMind.
Paul Vaughan (01:33:27) : “That’s pretty serious contrast.”
– but Milano Linate – an airport in a huge city – is even stranger:
Unhomogenized:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=623160800000&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
Homogenized:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=623160800000&data_set=2&num_neighbors=1
My car broke down on the Autostrada near Milano Linate on a hot summer day, so I know how hot asphalt can get in that place 😉
Paul Vaughan (01:33:27) & Espen (22:25:02)
Re alteration of De Bilt record after GIStemp homogeneity adjustment.
That is one of the worst I have seen, but results like this are all over GIStemp. I don’t know which is worse – homogeneity adjustments for UHI that CAUSE a warming trend, or rural stations that aren’t rural, are warming and aren’t adjusted.
Michel, I know. I never read Tamino normally. But I felt that a response from me was necessary for the record. So I read his three posts about me (wow – fame at last!) but ignored all comments.
I thought he was downright stupid, shooting himself in the foot, to say “I don’t believe you!” when I said I knew perfectly well that the Arctic had been warming a bit recently. I laughed, it was just funny.
I’ve done what was needed and have returned to the real science. Like Anthony does – note with what tender loving care he responds to some of the folk that hack off the rest of us. It can take time but I only do what I need to feel clean again! And curiously, the magical Universe often throws me gifts from such unlikely sources.
Serious suggestion:
In pondering issues with station records, consider very carefully what might be temporally confounded with any urban heat island (UHI) signal. (I would suggest thinking about varying oceanic-continental contrast, particularly in winter, in conjunction with awareness of north-south asymmetry & counter-balanced oscillations of Earth’s shells, particularly the multidecadal ones along the dominant north-south axis.)
While it is essential to have watchdogs keeping an eye on data integrity, that might be pennies, nickels, & dimes compared to the big natural factors towards which science has barely turned an eye.
Ellie in Belfast (12:09:56) “rural stations that aren’t rural”
I found it amusing that they have Agassiz, British Columbia, Canada listed as “rural”. (Someone should look at a topo map. I have a hunch that a lot of the folks confusing the climate discussion have never lived in & around mountains and moved up & down them regularly for years throughout the seasons.)
Espen (11:47:50) “Milano Linate – an airport in a huge city – is even stranger:
Unhomogenized:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=623160800000&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
Homogenized:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=623160800000&data_set=2&num_neighbors=1 “
I’ve seen some stations for coastal British Columbia, Canada that also reverse trend after homogenization (in documents I received by e-mail from the provincial government, if I remember correctly). If I have time, I’ll try to dig through the archives…
Some long-running European stations that point to a real warming trend in Europe are the alpine stations of Säntis, Switzerland (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Säntis – GISS data here: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=646066800003&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1) and Hohenpeissenberg in Germany (GISS data here: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=617109620002&data_set=2&num_neighbors=1).
Parantheses and punctuation were included in the URLs in my previous post, correct URLs follow:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=646066800003&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=617109620002&data_set=2&num_neighbors=1
One more alpine station with similar trend (Sonnblick, Austria):
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=603111460002&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
Re: Espen (16:12:27)
Thanks for those notes on alpine sites in Europe Espen.
A few years ago I received the green light to do a study of climate across an elevation gradient in my area, where we have strong winter “Arctic Outflow” winds that *blast* through the mountain valleys to the coast. Such cold, clear winter conditions alternate with more dominant episodes of wet, warm(ish) winter weather dominated by the Pacific (i.e. from the other direction – it’s like a fight between air masses on either side of the mountain range that runs along the whole west coast of North America). Relationships between precipitation & temperature *literally flip over* with the winter alternations (easily revealed using coplots). I know from first-hand experience that there are dramatic variations at mid-elevations as the snow-line fluctuates. (There can be 5 metres of snow at 1000m elevation while there is none at sea-level – the snowline fluctuates on about a ~weekly timescale.)
Regrettably, there just aren’t enough stations across a range of elevations to reflect what outdoor enthusiasts know about the band of sensitivity, so what is “just common sense” to hikers & skiers doesn’t even exist quantitatively-speaking (i.e. in official records). Additionally, there are very serious problems with the very few non-sea-level monitoring stations that exist. I had such absolutely undeniable evidence of severe problems (physically impossible events) that the government official I contacted immediately admitted to very serious quality control problems.
I was quite disappointed, as I know from first-hand experience that there is a prominent mid-elevation signal. I am left pondering alternate means of studying the historical variations in the pattern. One possibility might be to construct an index of historical Arctic Outflow frequency via careful conditional-analysis of sea-level stations, but that is going to miss a lot of useful info (for example about variation in the patterns of orographic effects) and involve error.
We’re stuck working with what we have. It’s probably worth the painstaking effort as these Arctic Outflow events are associated with large-scale northern-hemisphere winter patterns – so any major shifts in regional signal patterns might yield insight into events of global significance, for example the anomalous 1920-1940 interval (including the severe 1930s North American drought).
The story of the “big warming” at Spitsbergen provides a good example of how much intuition we can develop about statistics (including averages) by focusing on sensitive locales (that amplify signals).
Thanks again for the reply. Of course you must realize the house and senate were split pretty closely and many republicans are pretty liberal. The point was that major support would be required to eliminate the MASSIVE funding for envirowhackos and also that it is quite obviously a politicized issue.
I’ll never understand why people voted intentionally for socialism in the past election- it’s beyond my ability. It’s also difficult to believe a neutral position when voting for an obvious extremist like our current president. However, we’re way off topic now.
You know, I’ve got one more comment.
expanding the government viewpoint” would have led to anti-AGW funding which should have led to anti-AGW published articles.
This is faulty logic. You have missed the obvious, Bush did not support AGW, however the funding comes through science foundations all naturally seeking to expand their funding and grant money. While there is resistance from the sane people on earth, there was no attempt to stop funding of AGW. Instead IT WAS EXPANDED massively!
How can you think the government so monolithically follows the top guy? Govts always seek more growth and more funding as long as it is in any way possible to continue. Bush was an alleged conservative who allowed expansion of the central government more than any previous president allowing the corrupt banks to run over us lowly taxpayers in the single largest theft in history. He made no effort to shrink govt.
This is a very strange discussion. I’ll leave it alone now Anthony. Sorry for the OT.
REPLY: Let’s leave the discussion, end now. – Anthony
First he has a go at Lucia, then at Lucy. (And bans both)
Using The Team copyrighted statistics, I’d say the trend is pretty clear.
Lucy is a fine name btw, especially since it is also my daughter’s name!