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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Not to pick nits, Anthony, but…. Most of what I read on this site is excellent, but even some of the posters who make excellent points fail to edit their own posts. I refer here to the tendency of some posters to misspell common words. Since this blog has risen to the top of anti-AGW sites, it’s credibility might be improved by some self-editing. There are ‘typos’ and there are ‘dumbos.’ When someone types “thier” instead of “their,” that is a clear typo. When someone else writes “concences” instead of “consensus” it is a dumbo. So, please, could the moderators here take the liberty of correcting obvious misspellings before posting comments? Ditto for punctuation. As said above, “picking nits,” but credibility matters and people who failed to pay attention in English classes can damage that value. It goes without saying that foreign posters whose first language is not English get a pass; they do the best they can (usually very well), but there is no excuse for native speakers to mangle our common language. Thanks for listening.
Perhaps its time to take a break from data
and take a look at reality in the form
of some pictures–(pictures seem to be
very alien to agw modeling arguments)–
ice breaker sea ice news–
Real time (sep 7) sea ice pics of real sea ice–
not much open water in these
arctic pics–these pics need MORE
agw modeling–
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cutterhealy/page2/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cutterhealy/page5/
This is lots of new ice–
RECENTLY FORMED–
and SNOW COVERED AND NO SURFACE WATER–
thus indicating very low temperatures for
rapid formation of more and thicker ice–
and notice how the sea ice has rapidly resolidified
immediately after disruption by the icebreakers–
Yes, melting ended quite a while ago–
-massaged data from satellites or ground
stations cannot compete with the reality of real time pics.
The refreeze has begun in earnest and the melt is over–
Right now arctic temperatures
are much lower than anyone is admitting–
contrary to “officially” massaged
satellite and ground station sensory perecptions.
Speculation is rampant that these ice breakers
are searching for lost arks of greenpeas skippers.
AND this is the rest of the story–
SEE IF YOU CAN IDENTIFY ANY OPEN WATER
AT ALL IN THESE HIGH REOLUTION SATELLITE SHOTS OF
SNOW SNOW COVERED SEA ICE IN THE CANADIAN ARCHIPELEGO WHICH IS STILL
SUPPOSEDLY 70 PERCENT ICE FREE.
http://pafc.arh.noaa.gov/marfcst.php?fcst=FZAK80PAFC
Re: RR Kampen (02:14:00)
Remko, you have misunderstood Lucy’s post. Lucy is presenting the work of John Daly.
—
TonyB (01:56:05) “So the green resistance is startIng… “
Thank you for sharing your comments about the committee politics – very interesting (& consistent with my experience).
True greens deserve support & credit; it is the phonies [who outnumber the good ones 100:1 these days, it seems] who need to be firmly resisted. As the “environment industry” booms, phony environmental problems are stealing the spotlight from real ones. This is a multi-front war, as will become more & more evident as more & more capable people continue auditing the untenable assumptions upon which misguiding arguments are based.
People who think or pretend the issue is whether there is warming or not are either missing the point or engaging in (possibly malicious) obfuscation.
L (12:31:42) :
It’s not it’s, it’s its.
You wanna make a post complaining about grammar and tpyos, you ought to take extra care to not pwn yourself…
Espen (02:34:54) responding to RR Kampen’s “Is that really why all graphs end at or before the year 2003?”
“No, it’s because they’ve stopped collecting data!”
Espen, I suggest you check your claim.
Thanks for pointing this out:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/maps/
The choice between only 250km & 1200km spatial-smoothing is ‘interesting’. The polar projection option puts things into better perspective (for the purposes of this discussion).
Great graphic Lucy. What John Daly achieved is amazing but not very eye-catching to a casual observer, who would have to click on individual links. Your graphic deserves to be widely disseminated, not least beacuse a quick glance shows the lack of upward trend.
Oliver Ramsay (07:18:15) “Seeing Nick’s citing of warming in Fort Simpson […] 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?”
1.
Go here:
http://climate.weatheroffice.ec.gc.ca/climateData/canada_e.html
2.
Click the “Customized Search” button.
3.
Under “Search by Station Name” enter “Fort Simpson” in the “Name” box and hit the “Search” button a few lines down.
This turns up 5 hits.
Note that to get monthly series you need to select “monthly” from the drop-down menus. Once you’ve selected one of the stations and hit “Go”, the site will display a summary for only one year, but note under “Navigation Options” (under the table) the ‘Bulk Data’ option — click the ‘Bulk Data’ “CSV” hyperlink to get an Excel file of the data for the full record period.
It is common for Environment Canada to take years to update files. When you see many listings for one location, that is usually an indication of a station move — you may need to (carefully) piece together a few records for some locations.
Seeing a warming trend post-1976-climate-shift and a step-rise at 1998, which was a year when the Earth’s shells “galloped” (in the words of Russian scientist Yu.V. Barkin), is hardly surprising, particularly for NH sites (see Barkin).
As I’ve said upthread: Those who focus on whether there was warming or not are either missing the point or (possibly maliciously) obfuscating. The issue is that our understanding of natural climate variation and north-south oscillations (including at depth & altitude, not just at the surface) only sees the tip of the iceberg. We have orders of magnitude to go.
Thanks everyone. I’m making notes but it’s now too late to say all I want to say. So I’ll just talk to Scott Mandia for now.
Scott Mandia (05:03:37) : Lucy, Of course, you and I disagree about AGW and are both passionate. I do applaud you for backing up your arguments with data instead of just “talking trash”. Thanks Scott, and I applaud you for keeping with us for so long, I know it must be hard work. Curiously, you remind me of the time when I was in your shoes, and argued as persistently as you FOR AGW. I visited your website and note you refer folk to Coby Beck and the RC section on answering “contrarians”. You should add Skeptical Science.
It took me a lot of convincing to stop me in my tracks long enough to examine the critical evidence that turned me around. My web page on AGW had a similar feel to yours at that time. What took me time to change round was the work needed to deconstruct every single “answer to skeptics” from these three sites in particular. But I did it. And I’m glad I had to go the hard road, and thankful I had the time to do the job properly.
Here is a plot that shows this phenomena for locations north of 80 degrees: http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/janjul.jpg Ha, interesting – and WHERE is it? I’ve deliberately used records up to 3 times that length. I understand your argument re melting ice, but that does not change the non-HS quality of the data I’ve presented. I’ve now peeked at a few of NASA’s extensions up to 2009 – some show a rise, some do not; the average rise is still not enough to make the dramatic new hockey stick blade.
Scott Mandia (07:11:43) :…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. No, it doesn’t stand, but you’ll have to wait till tomorrow for exactly why I challenge you on this. Or maybe I’ll find someone else has answered you already, heck, it’s too much for me to read now!
Nick Stokes, that graph from NOAA is based on a small number of Arctic land stations mostly from the former Soviet Union.
The steep upward trend starting after 1920 and continuing through to WWII probably reflects the expansion of the Siberian and Arctic prison labor camps. The less steep rise starting in the 1960s probably reflects the rapid expansion of Soviet oil and gas development.
If that graph represents anything, it is how many people got shipped to the Arctic by Stalin, and how wastefully the Soviets used energy.
Ferdinand Engelbeen (09:34:41) & Ferdinand Engelbeen (09:13:35)
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/greenland_temp.html
Interesting – a few degrees warming at deep-sub-zero mid-January would not be the same thing physically as even mild mid-summer warming in a system of such insulation & reflection.
Anthony:
Well, Lucy’s post went as far south as Scotland. But in fact I was not seeking out Arctic Circle stations. I cited the top trend stations in the list for each of those countries. Interestingly, they were indeed mostly far North.
It’s described in detail >a href=”http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/ushcn/#dataaccess”>here, and in the cited papers. Homogenization modifies sites that are out of line with near neighbours, and so has rare application in the Arctic. It also has little effect on the zonal average, which is the measure I recommend.
And Kuhnkat, Lucy’s data are from GISS and Hadcrut as well, although the individual attribution isn’t specified. And UHI is not generally a problem in the Arctic.
Espen, Can you point us to the official Norwegian source of weather/climate records (as I’ve done above for Canada)?
Also, can anyone here do the same for Greenland (Denmark), Iceland, Finland, Sweden, Russia, & Alaska (USA)?
[Clarification: I’m not looking for a link to GISS, Hadley, etc.]
If so: thanks.
“”” Allen63 (03:25:20) :
Nice summary.
Hard to believe that such scattered surface sources could be used to create an Arctic temperature average accurate enough to guide trillion dollar policies. “””
They can’t but that simply does not stop climate “scientists” from believeing that statistical manipulations can extract information from data sets that contain none. After all, they believe they can describe the climate of the whole planet, from a handful of ice cores that are collected from tens of thousands of km apart; and which in no way represent a global map of anything.
It’s like watching the lady ahead of you waving her arm outside the driver’s side of the car; you can predict that she has her driver’s side window open; but you can’t predict anything else.
George
Note for Nick Stokes:
As Currie (1996) has cautioned us, spatial averages can be blinding.
Currie, R.G. (1996). Variance contribution of luni-solar (Mn) and solar cycle (Sc) signals to climate data. International Journal of Climatology 16(12), 1343-1364.
All one has to do is move across a sharp local gradient and things go out of phase (i.e. major signal not detected due to destructive interference).
It’s not a matter of “good” or “bad” – it’s a matter of interpretation. Parameter estimates should be investigated across a variety of spatiotemporal scales.
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.
Except that the zones chosen in GIStemp are themselves a cherry pick. Take a look at the code. It is a parameter. Someone built that code to let them play with the zone sizes until they got what they were looking for. Only then was it locked down at 6 zones. And 6 is a way too big number. It hides the migration of thermometers to the south, for example. Take a look at the “UPDATE” down at the bottom and compare the GIStemp 6 zones to the benchmark 9 zones.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/08/17/thermometer-years-by-latitude-warm-globe/
Now, in STEP2 of GIStemp it does the “zonal” step. And in that step, it has chosen a zone that puts Alaskan Military Air Bases in place to be used as “rural” temperature stations for UHI correction (find “Alaska” in the comments):
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/08/23/gistemp-fixes-uhi-using-airports-as-rural/
So I will take a fixed set of stations that does not change, or a “natural” proxy that does not change, over a zonalized cherry picked fantasy.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/08/05/agw-is-a-thermometer-count-artifact/
Sean Ogilvie (04:44:52) : This isn’t just one grid but four adjacent ones plus at least three others that are impacted by this crap. If you let crap like this in what does it say about the integrity of the entire database that is supposed to be accurate within a tenth of an inch?
You got it! GIStemp “cooks the books” with airport tarmac then spreads the goo around as far as it can filling in all the missing data with dreck. It is useless.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/09/08/gistemp-islands-in-the-sun/
@Smokey (07:51:30) :
“Natural climate variability explains the climate, with no need for an extra variable like carbon dioxide.”
Which would that be? I do not recall seeing anything in a peer-reviewed journal that shows (with any confidence and peer support) any natural forcing to be the cause of the modern day global warming. The first person to do so wins the Nobel and their name hangs on the wall with the Galielos, Darwins and Einsteins. So there is certainly an incentive.
@Polar Bear League (08:21:56) :
I have been wanting to go to Iceland for years but I cannot convince my wife to go to an expensive place that does not include palm trees. 🙂
@Martin Mason (09:56:18) :
See my comments to Smokey.
@Manuel (10:59:44) :
3) Start investing money, science and technology resources in “cleaner”, more effective energy sources, or in real world solutions to counteract the future warming (if it does in fact occur).
I couldn’t AGREE with you more!
Jeff Id (11:56:58) :
Jeff, I think if you viewed my original posts you will see that I stated that Lucy’s plots cannot be used to refute a 2000 year plot. That is pretty basic math and everybody should understand these plots are comparing apples vs. oranges. I have not claimed that the paper is ironclad proof of AGW. It appears that whenever I post a comment it turns into a pro-AGW vs. anti-AGW debate. Maybe that is my fault but that was not my original intention. I think my position is pretty well articulated now.
BTW, I will absolutely study your site and its analyses. I just bookmarked it.
@Lucy Skywalker (15:24:57) :
Thanks for replying to me and thanks for that bookmark. You are a very good sport. 🙂
Reply: Iceland is not the expensive destination it was 13 months ago ~ ctm
“”” Scott Mandia (05:03:37) :
Lucy,
Of course, you and I disagree about AGW and are both passionate. I do applaud you for backing up your arguments with data instead of just “talking trash”.
I interperate this thread as a response to the recent paper by Kaufman et al. where they show the Arctic has reversed a 2,000 year cooling trend, especially in the last 100 years and the last 10 years. Your data actually supports their claim because all of these plots show warmer temps than those of the previous 2000 years. Of course, you cannot reproduce their hockey stick if you are not using 2000 years of data.
As has been mentioned by others in other blogs, summer data in ice covered areas will skew the annual data because the heat is being used to melt the ice and temps do not move much. This is why Anthony Watts analysis in a previous post was very misleading. His animation did show warming in the cooler season. Here is a plot that shows this phenomena for locations north of 80 degrees:
http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/janjul.jpg
I know many of you do not view Tamino’s posts but there may be a few of you interested in another interpretation of what the Arctic is doing. “””
Why don’t you simply issue personalized invitations Scott, if you want to siphon readers from WUWT over to whatever your site is. It’s a good strategy. I listen to the most popular morning talk radio show in the SF Bay area (as measured by the ratings people); it happens to be a politically realist station. Well you wouldn’t know that by listening to the paid station advertising; it is heavily leftist/socialist/Marxist advertising, often by the very interests who were getting blasted by the show hosts five minutes before they ran the ad, such as the CTA for example.
Well it is no mystery; the show has the largest listenership by far, including both ends of the political spectrum, and everything in between. So the wacky advertisers know they are reaching the largest listening audience out there; including all the masochistic lefties and greenies who just can’t bring themsleves to not listen to a message that puts them in their place every day.
But may I suggest, Scott, that the best way to improve your readership, is not to post stuff here on anthony’s open forum; but to clean up your own act over at your site, and make it an open forum.
When people drop coins into an empty well, and never get a return echo, when the coin hits the bottom; they pretty soon get tired of dropping coins in there.
So go back and fix up your place, instead of coming here with shovel ready hay that has already been once through the horse.
George
Scott Mandia (17:44:49),
Your post above is unclear. What do you mean by ‘which would that be?’
If you’re referring to carbon dioxide, Occam’s Razor shows that an unnecessary entity like CO2 should be promptly dispensed with:
Never increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything.
~ William of Ockham [1285-1349]
See, you need to start with the presumption that CO2 is not necessary to explain the climate. Looked at that way, CO2 never becomes an essential entity. It unnecessarily clouds the issue.
This article shows the last several warming/cooling cycles, going back to the 1800’s. [Great bibliography too, be sure to check it out.]
Those natural multi-decadal cycles have nothing to do with carbon dioxide. Therefore CO2 should be disregarded as an entity in any explanation of climate change. Because if any old extraneous entity is thrown into the explanation, who knows what correlations we would find? click
KBK (11:53:16) : Northern Hemisphere Sea Ice Extent which shows that the summer extent is about 60% of what it was as recently as 1970.
What is the data behind this plot? Is it considered to be bogus?
Well, in the late ’60s and early ’70s it was abnormally cold. It snowed a few times in the Central Valley of California. I was a kid then and asked the “Old Timers” about it. They reflected and said basically: “Well, it has been warmer for a few decades, but a long time ago when I was a kid it snowed like this a couple of times…”
Now, years later, we have “abnormal warmth” like we had in the 1930’s and folks are remembering that it used to be colder “a long time ago when I was a kid”…
And guess what? In another of decade or so, when it snows again, I’ll be telling some little kid (hopefully some future grandkid) “Well, it has been warmer for a few decades, but a long time ago when I was a kid it snowed like this a couple of times…”
The moral? A full PDO cycle is 60 years. People live 3 score year and 10.
Do the math.
E.M.Smith (18:22:20) : It’s not gonna snow in the Valley again unless you guys stop growing Avacados:
Christy, J.R., W.B. Norris, K. Redmond and K. Gallo, 2006: Methodology and results of calculating central California surface temperature trends: Evidence of human-induced climate change? J. Climate, 19, 548-563.
http://ams.allenpress.com/perlserv/?request=get-abstract&doi=10.1175%2FJCLI3627.1
steven mosher (12:19:04) : The Issue is this table relies on GISTEMP. E.M. Smith has had some rather interesting things to say about the processing that code uses. Personally, I found the code to be a mess and the critical components ( station reference method and the bias method) where not well documented or very understandable.
Well, it is a mess. And documentation? There isn’t any in the normal sense. A few fragments have some comments, but not much. GIStemp has all the markers of a hacked together ‘hand tool’ that “just growed”. There is clear re-use and repositioning of code bits with dead code left laying about. There are sloppy technique and bad “design” all over the place (including scribbling scratch files in your “source code repository”).
I’ve “quit” a dozen times.
It is now part of my strategy. Work on it until I can’t stand it any more and want to upchuck. Walk away and visit a “warmer” site until I just MUST come back. Take a moment to read something Really Well Done (like Lucy’s work here). Then “suck it up” and dive back in…
As I’ve said before, if one of the people on my staff wrote this, they would be told to fix it. If it came back less than stellar, they would be “walked out”. This code is NOT suitable for shipping and is NOT suitable for “production”. It is certainly NOT suitable for anything critical (or even very important.)
You can share one of my “GACK” moments here:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/08/29/gistemp-invnt-f-a-sympathy-plea/
An example of sloppy coding technique that warms the entire body of the data by an average of 1/1000 C is here:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/07/30/gistemp-f-to-c-convert-issues/
And a fairly technical look at the kind of “clean up” needed to make this structurally “proper” (i.e. NOT scribble scratch files in the source code) is here:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/07/29/gistemp-a-cleaner-approach/
In about 6 months I expect to have decent documentation done. Maybe. If I can stand it… (Need to visit a warmer site again 😉
For now, I have a working Linux port available as a “tarball” to anyone who wants it.
On O Factor tonight, Joe Bastardi is giving a lecture on ocean changes causing weather changes, not AGW. Greanpeas backed out and was a “no show”.
I love Joe. He’s telling folks to go find out for themselves, not trust him, and now he’s covering cyclone energy and the lack of a trop. hot spot…
Forgive me if someone else has pointed this out already, but the comments by Nick and Scott about the Kaufmann paper brought a question to mind. Even if you accept the presentation of the Kaufmann paper as correct, why is a 2000 year period assumed to represent some sort of golden mean? 2000 years is nothing in terms of geological time. There could be any sort of trend over a 2000 year period, and it would mean nothing in terms of predicting the next 2000 years. The complete inability of the AGW proponents to grasp geological time scales never ceases to amaze me. The perfect example of this is the fixation on the 1979-2000 mean of (fill in the blank here) as some meaningful measurement of “normal”. In any geological context, or even the context of biological evolution, it’s laughable to consider an arbitrarily chose 21-year period as a representation of “normal”. There is no “normal”. There is only constant change. That’s why the continents are not where they once were.
Throwing in one more comment:
Scott, even though you chose to ignore my earlier comment, I’m with Lucy in one regard. I USED to believe. I also had a big AGW website, and was about to get a company going to plant trees and do other “mitigation” activities.
Guess what happened while I was researching the data to build the site?
That’s right: I realized that not one single aspect of the AGW data is credible. This was in 2002, when there were no sites like this, and I stumbled across Daly’s site. At first I resisted… the warmers were very effective at making me think he and others (Pielke, etc.) were “flakes” or “in denial”. It appeared to me as though AGW was self-evident. Then, because I happen to be a very persistent and thorough person, I actually read and processed what was going on.
AGW is, choose one or more:
1. a myth
2. the result of cumulative innocent errors
3. an outright fraud
4. the result of well meaning but misguided researchers
Whichever, the two things AGW is NOT are:
1. credible
2. actual