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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Lucy,
I saw your comment yesterday and really appreciated the link. I’m glad it was turned into a full-fledged WUWT article.
Nice work.
Mark
There is one proxy which drives the big blade on the hockey stick in this Kaufman Arctic study – Series 22 – which rises to a huge +6.97C in the most recent decades.
That is Briffa’s Yamal Pennisula tree ring reconstruction (This is the same one that Steve McIntyre has been trying to get the data and methods for but has not been successful.)
Briffa took a very detailed 4,000 long year tree-ring reconstruction (which shows very little temperature change at all) and adjusted it by using some obscure tree-ring density measures from a near-by tree-ring reconstruction.
It is still not clear what was done but it is very clear that temperatures in the Yamal Pennisula have not increased by +6.97C in the last two decades (up to 1.0C perhaps).
Here is the original Yamal tree-ring reconstruction data versus Kaufmann and Briffa’s numbers.
http://img89.imageshack.us/img89/6644/yamaltreerings.png
This is what the chart looks like if one puts the proper Yamal data in (and reverses the sign on the upside down Tijander lake sediment study).
http://img180.imageshack.us/img180/6282/fixedkaufman.png
Interesting that the Little Ice Age, the recent warming, the downturn in 1975, the Medieval Warm period, the Roman Warm Period etc. now all show up.
Yamal study.
http://www.nosams.whoi.edu/PDFs/papers/Holocene_v12a.pdf
Yamal data.
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/treering/reconstructions/asia/russia/yamal_2002.txt
An Excel spreadsheet of Kaufman’s data is here.
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/reconstructions/arctic/kaufman2009arctic.xls
It’s really silly to stick a straight line trend through an obviously oscillating natural pattern which has just reached it’s new maximum and is probably now on the way back down again. Yet that is what is done in Nick’s referenced plot. And he has the cheek to talk about cherry-picking! The most anyone can say is that the Arctic might be slightly hotter now than it was in the early part of the 20th century though any difference is well within the margins of error. Furthermore the oscillating pattern matches very well with solar activity as W. Soon has shown.
Thanks Lucy for you excellent work. 22 charts and no hockey stick!. But there is one the big nose, Pinochio-like, the big one of the IPCC.
It would be just funny, but it leaves everybody wondering why lying about climate everyday and everywhere. Why all that daily propaganda through all media, millions and millions spent everyday.
Which are those big interests behind?. After all these big, big “investments”, bigger profits are evidently expected, which all of us without exception will have to pay.
We are in need, now, not only of identifying, if “hockey sticks” are false, but of identifying those who have carefully planned this, because it is a big, big, the biggest “swindle” ever conceived.
Asking the Manniacs who create the hockey sticks how they do it, is like asking Michael Angelo how he created beautiful statues from lumps of marble.
Angelo’s answer was, I remove everything that is not the beautiful statue’.
The Manniacs simply discard everything that is not a hockey stick, and voila! A hockey stick emerges from the lump of data, like Venus on the half shell.
Nick Stokes (01:55:48) :
Hi Nick – could you describe in detail how GISS does their zonal averaging and homogenization for the Arctic? Have you plotted their raw data?
Thanks.
Re: Nogw (05:57:56) : do you think certain oil companies like ExxonMobile have no financial interests?
Nick Stokes:
First a comment about the Norwegian data – I’m Norwegian, and other Norwegians should correct me if I’m wrong, but I *think* the Gardermoen station may be close to Oslo Gardermoen Airport – Norway’s largest international Airport. If I’m right, no data from Gardermoen since 1998 can be trusted. Regardless of the runways themselves, the whole area was changed tremendously with the airport, it used to have much smaller airport and a military airport.
Next, Greenland over 30 years doesn’t say much, as it was pretty much at the bottom of a long downwards trend around 1980. As I have shown above, temperatures were higher in the thirties than they are now.
Here we might reach a few thousand eyeballs, and a few gripers are concerned we might be misleading people by looking at actual 20th century measured temperatures instead of proxies.
Too bloody right, mate!
Scott,
(This totally OT, but I just can’t resist)
I have visited your excellent site. It is clear that you have taken a great deal of work to put it together and it seems that you understand the underlying science behind.
I can’t help but wonder, do you really believe it?
In particular, on the page http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/global_warming/modern_day_climate_change.html, you say: (I am quoting you)
– Only a complete shut-off of CO2 emissions would result in a long-term stabilization at a constant level.
– Cutting CO2 emissions by 50% today will only stabilize the levels for the next 10 years.
So, Scott, I think we have a problem here, don’t we?
You seem to be an inteligent person, and as such, I am sure you agree that cutting emissions by half is absolutely impossible. Just mentioning shutting-off emissions completely is plainly stupid (I am sorry about the word, but it really is stupid).
Therefore, Scott. What is the deal? What do you exactly propose here?
Don’t you understand that if what you tell on your site were true, we are doomed?
I am the kind of person that will bet 1,000,000 to 1 that the world is not going to end tomorrow. You know why? Because if I lose, I won’t have to pay and if I win, I win twice (even though I am not going to make a lot of money).
And you know what? Taking my bet is stupid (I am sorry again, but that is what it is).
You say that we have a great problem because CO2 is going to cause a hell of a problem to Earth.
Yet, you know that we are not going to reduce the CO2 emissions for the foreseable future. Even if we, the stupid developped countries (again the word), decide to commit an economical suicide, total emissions are still going up because the developing countries are more smart.
Rather than betting that the end of the world is coming, why don’t you take a sensible approach and try to figure out how to solve the problem in a feasible way?
I don’t think that CO2 is causing any problem, so I can sleep very well.
Nick Stokes (01:55:48) :
When there’s a trend, you can always cherry-pick locations that show it to a lesser extent. But the zonal average tells a more representative story. The Arctic is warming. There’s a plot and link to data here.
The Arctic has been warming for last 30 years – but it just mimic warming in the first half of 20th century.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=634010650000&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=634010250000&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=222206740006&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=634010010003&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=431043600000&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=620040300000&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=652060110003&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
All rural stations with 100 years trend show the same. How comrades from CRU managed to create a hockey stick from such data is beyond me, but maybe it is the “added value” they do not want to share with anybody.
Lucy, thanks for this post. For those who have never seen the decimation of actual temperature monitoring stations, and therefore the decimation of actual data, see this:
http://i44.tinypic.com/23vjjug.jpg
It makes it hard to believe anyone in charge takes actual temperature measurement seriously, they obviously believe they can just estimate it. And what is the response temperature has to being estimated instead of measured? see here:
http://i27.tinypic.com/14b6tqo.jpg
As I tried to read the article on post normal science I became increasingly nauseated–it should be abnormal non-science. The notion that opinion and fear should out-weigh data and the scientific methodology is beyond my elderly comprehension. Beyond that the most interesting part of the discussion of this excellent article relates to the lack of data, the inconsistencies of the data sites and the masssive assumptions of “2000 years” of data when in fact no data was collected and conclusions were drawn from analysis that are at best educated guesses with multiple assumptions.
Anthony Wattas replied:
Hyping scientific papers in the press prior to their publication seems like an act of desperation to me.
This is unfair because you routinely comment on papers you have not actually read because they are “behind the paywall”.
Of course, proxy data is not as high quality as actual measurements but in studies of climate we do not have the luxury of direct measurements for the past. At some point, you have to accept the proxy data with a certain degree of error otherwise we might as well just not study climate change.
My point still stands that camparing plots that are 100 years or fewer and that end in 2002 or earlier, CANNOT be used to debunk a study that shows a 2,000 year trend has changed in the past 100 years and even more so in the previous ten years.
@Manuel (06:47:02) :
I am happy that you visited my site because one must always consider the “other camp’s” position when debating. You need to understand the context of those statements. Those statements show that AGW is serious, that it is going to get worse even if we take steps to reduce AGW, and that we are not going back to pre-AGW climate for quite some time even using the best solutions. We cannot afford a “wait and see” approach.
As I have mentioned before, my goal is to move the debate from Is there AGW? to What are the implications of AGW and what are we going to do about it? These are far from my expertise so, as one can see, I offer no solutions to that question. The problem is that if we still debate the causes of warming we will never move forward to the real debate and the solutions will become even more costly.
REPLY: It is perfectly fair. I choose not to engage in the paywall in most cases because as a US taxpayer, I find it reprehensible that I should have to pay twice for a study. Once to fund it and once to read it. In the rarefied world of academics, you don’t have to worry about such things, because it is paid for you to have access. But I think every journalist and blogger is in the same situation. They don’t subscribe to these journals either and if they asked for a budget, they would not likely get it since to cover all the journals it might be several thousand dollars. People in academics that have all this at their disposal don’t get this resentment from the average working taxpayer of which I am one.
The unfairness is lack of public access to our free press and to the taxpayers that fund this research. It’s flat wrong to put out a press release ahead of a journal publication as Kaufman did. Nobody could check it if they wanted to. I think the authors counted on this. The Kaufman paper is the worst perversion of science I’ve seen recently. Its more Mannian proxy dreck and questionable statistical methods trying to justify it. Many of the proxies have no proven temperature signature/stability. Trees are better proxies for moisture than they are temperature.
As for your goal, you missed a step. “What is the true magnitude and cause of AGW”? – A
Nick Stokes offers us these figures (among others):
Or Canada over 50 years:
CHANGE IN AVERAGE TEMPERATURE
FROM 1959 TO 2008 (UNIT °C)
Trend computation : Linear regression
STATION CHANGE(°C) YEARS METER ASL
INUVIK (N. : 3.89 (1959 – 2008) 68
FORT_SMITH : 2.87 (1959 – 2008) 203
FORT SIMPS : 2.59 (1959 – 2008) 169
YELLOW_KNI : 2.53 (1959 – 2008) 205
NORMAN_WEL : 2.21 (1959 – 2008) 67
DAWSON (YU : 2.19 (1959 – 2008) 370
It’s not entirely clear to me how data is recorded and shared but I doubt that there are multiple contributors from these very remote locations. Even more remote are the stations Rabbit Kettle and Virginia Falls in Canada’s Northwest Territories.
Several times last winter I tried to alert the people at wunderground to the curious fact that the forecasts for these two locations each day were in the -30C range (just like the rest of the Territory) but the recorded temperatures were consistently in the range of +5C. I received one e-mail in acknowledgement with an assurance that it would be checked out. Nothing changed and I heard no more.
Seeing Nick’s citing of warming in Fort Simpson, which is a proximal station, I am wondering again about the smearing of data that Surface Stations has described.
It’s my understanding that the source of the Canadian data is Environment Canada, but their own site didn’t seem to list these particular stations. Does anybody know about this?
Juraj V: The rimfrost.no site that Nick recommended also shows much more moderate trends if you choose the 100 year trend option. And if they had offered a 70-year trend option, we’d see almost zero trend for most station…
NORWAY
CHANGE IN AVERAGE TEMPERATURE
FROM 1909 TO 2008 (UNIT °C)
Trend computation :
SELECTION : ALL STATIONS
COUNTRY/REGION MEAN VALUE : 0.7°C
STATION CHANGE(°C) YEARS METER ASL
NESBYEN – Nes(Busk) : 1.39 (1909 – 2008) 164
NORDØYAN FYR – Vikna(N.Trlag) : 1.2 (1909 – 2008) 15
RØROS – (S.Trlag) : 1.2 (1909 – 2008) 626
ALTA – Elvebakken – Alta(Finm) : 1.05 (1909 – 2008) 3
FÆRDER FYR – Tjøme(V.fold) : 1.04 (1909 – 2008) 6
BERGEN – FLORIDA : 0.92 (1909 – 2008) 12
LISTA – Farsund(V.Agder) : 0.88 (1909 – 2008) 14
KJØREMSGRENDE – Lesja(Oppl) : 0.86 (1909 – 2008) 626
VARDØ – (Finm) : 0.85 (1909 – 2008) 14
BODØ – (Nordl) : 0.77 (1909 – 2008) 11
UTSIRA FYR – Utsira(Rogaland) : 0.74 (1909 – 2008) 55
OKSØY FYR – Kr.sand(V.Agder) : 0.6 (1909 – 2008) 9
ONA – Husøy (M&R) : 0.56 (1909 – 2008) 13
TORUNGEN FYR – Arendal(A.Agder) : 0.56 (1909 – 2008) 12
ANDØYA – Andøy(Nordl) : 0.44 (1909 – 2008) 10
TROMSØ – LANGNES (Troms) : 0.41 (1909 – 2008) 9
OSLO – BLINDERN : 0.36 (1909 – 2008) 94
KARASJOK (Finm) : 0.33 (1909 – 2008) 131
LILLEHAMMER – SÆTERENGEN (HOMOGEN.) : 0.32 (1909 – 2008) 242
KAUTOKEINO (Finm) : 0.2 (1909 – 2008) 307
MANDAL (V.Agder) : 0.07 (1909 – 2008) 138
Whenever you take a subset of data you will get a trend, no matter how small. Even people with no agendas can take the same data sets and treat it such that it reveals a trend.
But there’s several key points:
* we only have a subset of data points.
* a lot of historical data points are not measured in the same way as recent data points.
* recent data points are more numerous than historical data points.
* differing trends are presented using those data points.
* ignoring absolute values when calculating and demonstrating trends.
Because of this, there is no conclusive demonstration of a radical trend (in any direction); aka. the “what *is* normal, anyway?”. How can you create a public policy on, well, anything without conclusive evidence of an actual event, as well as the inability to even demonstrate a causal effect of said event?
When someone has something to gain, the temptation to cherrypick data is much higher. Since the AGW crowd has no compunction about penalizing *others* for their ‘evil ways’, greatly exaggerating and lying about cause and effects, it’s little wonder that any pro-AGW ‘evidence’ is held suspect.
I have also been watching the individual GISS stations for quite some time and found the same result. Thanks Lucy for bringing it to public attention.
Lots of manipulation going on here I believe….it pays to do your own research.
BTW…the late John Daly was a huge Landscheidt fan 🙂
More from rimfrost: Here’s what you get for Greenland if you choose the 100 year trend:
GREENLAND
CHANGE IN AVERAGE TEMPERATURE
FROM 1909 TO 2008 (UNIT °C)
Trend computation :
SELECTION : ALL STATIONS
COUNTRY/REGION MEAN VALUE : 0.18°C
STATION CHANGE(°C) YEARS METER ASL
ILLULISAT -JACOBSHAVN (WEST) : 0.7 (1909 – 2008) 0
UPERNAVIK (NORTH WEST) : 0.27 (1909 – 2008) 122
ANGMASSALIK (SOUTH EAST) : 0.06 (1909 – 2008) 52
TASIILAQ (EAST) : 0.04 (1909 – 2008) 0
NUUK – GODTHÅP (SOUTH WEST) : 0.0 (1909 – 2008) 70
NUUK-NASA (SOUTH WEST) : 0.0 (1909 – 2008) 70
But again, I miss the 70-year option… But wait, rimfrost can tell us more, let’s see which decades were the hottest in Illulisat:
STATION ILLULISAT -JACOBSHAVN (WEST) , POS : 69.12 – -51.10, 0meter a.s.l
(DMI)
AVERAGE TEMP : -4.9 (1873-2009)
THE 10 WARMEST 11-YEAR PERIODS 1873-2009
YEARS (FROM-TO) AVERAGE TEMP (NB Only periods without missingdata are included)
1927-1937 -3.03
1928-1938 -3.14
1926-1936 -3.24
1925-1935 -3.34
1924-1934 -3.37
1929-1939 -3.37
1996-2006 -3.53
1930-1940 -3.56
1923-1933 -3.62
1932-1942 -3.68
Sean Ogilvie (02:44:58) :
It’s good to see John Daly remembered. It was “Still Waiting for Greenhouse” that first got me interested in global warming
Same here-got to communicate with John several times,mainly about Tasmania and
Hobart’s similar climate to Coos Bay,Or. Thanks, Lucy….
RR Kampen (06:09:00) :
Re: Nogw (05:57:56) : do you think certain oil companies like ExxonMobile have no financial interests?
For convincing everybody not to use fossil fuels, which they produce and sell?, that would be extremely crazy.
Scott Mandia (07:11:43),
When your premise is wrong, your conclusion will be wrong. And so it is when someone tries to show that CO2=AGW. CO2 does not cause noticeable global warming. Its effect is so small that it can be completely disregarded. See? In fact, it appears more and more that AGW is made up out of whole cloth. Natural climate variability explains the climate, with no need for an extra variable like carbon dioxide.
The ARGO buoys show a slight cooling trend in the deep oceans, and there is no tropospheric “hot spot” to be found. Thus, there is no “warming in the pipeline.” With no hidden global warming lurking and waiting to pounce, the premise that CO2 will cause runaway global warming is effectively falsified. It is simply an untrue statement. You will have to find another reason to be alarmed.
But if you base your premise on reality, instead of simply assuming that the temporary coincidence of rising CO2 and rising temperatures proves causation, then you will see how insignificant the rise in that very minor trace gas is. The planet is telling us the truth; it is people, motivated by the really huge amounts of money in play, who have the motivation to lie about what is, and what is not, happening.
My well meaning advice: listen to the planet: click. She is telling you that CO2 is a non-problem. And our planet doesn’t lie.
Nick, why not look at the Rimfrost data from the earliest Arctic records. Upernavik has about the earliest, starting from 1873, and is pretty much flat.
..but in the meantime, the hysteria reaches new and absurd levels, as EU starts to contaminate its environment with mercury in order to cut CO2 emissions: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/business/energy-environment/01iht-bulb.html?em
Nick Stokes,
thanks for throwing GISS data at us as if it is useful.
Whether it is UHI, dropping true rural stations, using station temps 1200 km away to give that necessary higher AVERAGE temp, GISS and YOU are full of it!!!!!!