From WUWT on March 16, 2008, we found this article and it is now just getting national news exposure. I’m bringing it forward again since there has been a lot of activity in search engine traffic that has found its way here tonight.
Sean Hannity read from it during his Fox News show.
Read the original article here:
November 2nd, 1922. Arctic Ocean Getting Warm; Seals Vanish and Icebergs Melt.
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Barry Foster (03:47:47) :
That anomalous: I read their releases almost daily over the last 15 years or so. There was nothing whatsoever claiming that temperatures would “level off” over the last 15 years, unless i’ve missed something. Still, i’ll ask them where they stated this
jeez (04:04:13)
Yet they state recently that 2010 will be the hottest year on record and that global warming would recommence after 2008 (they wrote that in late 2007).
Maybe you’re confusing the 15 years levelling off period with a more competent climate agency or else a scientific research paper?
Here is what I was remembering.
It was the year 2014 that I remembered. Not 14 years.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/3302874/Global-warming-forecast-predicts-rise-in-2014.html
Here is the nearest MET office leveling off forecast, made in 2007 but after the event.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/aug/10/weather.uknews
British scientists are predicting a succession of record-breaking high temperatures in the most detailed forecast of global warming’s impact on weather around the world.
Powerful computer simulations used to create the world’s first global warming forecast suggests temperature rises will stall in the next two years, before rising sharply at the end of the decade.
From 2010, they warn, every year has at least a 50% chance of exceeding the record year of 1998 when average global temperatures reached 14.54C.
jeez (04:09:50)
Its all very confusing. Climate will level off, but will continue to warm over the next 10 years and 2014 will be 0,3C warmer than 2003, and half the years will be warmer than 1998. It will slow down but it will speed up as soon as it slows down, all in the space of a few years.. thereafter it will really hit the roof.
Still, the assertion was that the prior years, from 2002 onwards were predicted to level off by this chief of the met. This isn’t the case
TonyB mentions Bob Bartlett and Pathe new reels. You can actually see some of those at the British Pathe website and search for ‘Bob Bartlett’
http://www.britishpathe.com
In the days when warmer arctic waters led to “favourable ice conditions”. Now its “OMG the world is ending ice conditions”.
And here is a look at something they were saying in 1999 about 2000. Not a press release but a report and only looking at one year.
Empirical Prediction of the Global Temperature
Anomaly for 2000
contributed by Chris Folland and Andrew Colman
The Met Office, Bracknell, United Kingdom
Excerpt
Our overall best estimate forecast of the temperature anomaly for the year 2000 is 0.41+-0.16 oC, or a range from 0.25 oC to 0.57 oC based on the intrinsic skill of the empirical hindcasts. The uncertainty +-0.16 oC represents approximately the 5% and 95% confidence limits of the individual forecasts. Thus there is about an 80% probability that 2000 will be warmer than 1999 but just less than a 5% probability that 2000 will be as warm or warmer than the warmest year, 1998.
http://www.iges.org/ellfb/Mar00/cole1.00.htm
OT, but I got a good laugh out of this explanation from my morning newspaper in Halifax, NS:
“With the icy weather on the front page of all the major U.K. dailies (“BRRRITAIN!” shivered the Daily Mirror) some wondered what role if any climate change played in the cold snap — the country’s longest since 1981. British opposition lawmaker Ann Winterton attracted jeers of derision when she told Britain’s House of Commons that the snow “clearly indicates a cooling trend.”
Weather experts said the bout of cold weather didn’t necessarily reflect climate change one way or the other.
Robin Thwaytes, the duty forecaster at Britain’s weather office, said that, while “it’s very unusual for something like this to last as long as it has,” such events do happen every 20 to 30 years.”
Bob Tisdale (04:01:31)
I’m puzzled by your remark, Bob, because your link shows all three lines rising slowly up to around 2000 then either flattening or declining.
Or have I missed something ?
another thing: the statement is that *human activities* (ie co2) are now the most dominant factor in the climate, meaning that natural factors cannot *mask* them, which they wrote in 2007. This new model, which looks like a mish mash of co2+natural factors seems to refute their prior assertion, though they rationalise around this by claiming it was masking human induced global warming.
its as absurd as the forecast based on this same model that predicted a warm winter for 2008/9 in the UK. When it turned out to be one of the coldest they rationalised around it by saying “It would have been even colder if it had not been for global warming”
“Dr. Max (03:22:23) :
In the summer of 1930 the remains of Andrée’s Balloon Expedition to the North Pole 1897 were found on the island Vitön east of Svalbard. This was due to unusually strong melting of ice and snow because of a warm summer”
It should be noted that a search expedition actually landed on Vitön in 1898, i e the year after the Andrée Expedition, but found nothing since the remains were deeply buried by the snow. It was only after the arctic warming in the 1920’s that uncovered them.
P Wilson (04:22:05
oops. I’m getting confused by the Met Office farrago. (Its like an infection)
“still, the assertion was that the prior years, from 2002 onwards were predicted to level off by this chief of the met. This isn’t the case”
It isn’t the case that they predicted it, but is the case that the Met chief said that they did
THre was also a NYT feature in 1938 warning of arctic melt and global warming if anyone can find it. It reports a Russian ship floating in open waters 300 miles from the North Pole.
We’ll always have Paris – and we’ll always have this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyDmdcPw7Uw Personally, I can’t wait for 2014 to come. Oh, Ms Pope, my email will be pre-written and ready to send!
Here’s another Arctic story the mainstream media missed, I think Anthony had a similar story around April 2009 with more background information:
http://www.c3headlines.com/2009/04/images-of-arctic-pole-icefree-march-1959-its-happened-before-preglobal-warming-hype.html
Simply amazing how many great climate stories the press has totally missed, especially the folks at Fox. They really should assign someone to read WUWT on a daily basis. Fox would have new, interesting material to work with every single day that none of the other networks would mention. It would be a climate “scoop” of the day, every day for Fox.
Robert Norwood, although I’m a complete contrarian, we humans DO affect global temperatures – most definitely. We shouldn’t deny this. Through land-use change, particle emissions, and so many other activities. The effect is certain. The argument is by how much? CO2 from us has a very small effect, and even then, could have negative feedbacks in the form of increased cloud cover etc. We must set out our stall and state the truth. Warmists make the mistake of stating that our effect is huge. Let’s not make a similar mistake by stating that our effect is non-existent.
Stephen Wilde, “I’m puzzled by your remark, Bob, because your link shows all three lines rising slowly up to around 2000 then either flattening or declining.”
But read what you wrote previously, “It is patently obvious that the global air circulation systems moved poleward from around 1975 and that resulted in a small amount of warming in the troposphere,” and continued with, “It is equally obvious that they started moving equatorward again as long ago as 2000 which is a fact that I noted at the time and that I have been proclaiming for two years now. That resulted in, first a pause in warming and now, probably a cooling.”
And again, here’s the graph.
http://i49.tinypic.com/2dt9b37.png
Show me where the heat moves poleward then back toward the equator, please. Remember the 80s and 90s were impacted by volcanic eruptions, too.
Re press hysteria over global ‘climate change’ (hotter or colder), the Business and Media Institute published a very nice history called “Fire and Ice,” here:
http://www.businessandmedia.org/specialreports/2006/fireandice/fireandice.asp
It begins:
/Mr Lynn
Bob Tisdale (05:03:12)
The heat doesn’t move poleward and then back equatorward.
It is the air circulation systems that move poleward under a warming pressure from the tropical oceans and then move equatorward again as the warming pressure from the tropical oceans declines.
So the troposphere as a whole gets warmer when the tropical oceans are releasing energy faster and the sign that it is happening is the poleward shift of the air circulation systems. Vice versa for cooling.
Entirely consistent with your chart.
The tropical oceans show the most marked trend and the other latitudes follow on different timescales and to different degrees because of the different land and ocean distributions.
If anything your chart proves my point.
So unless someone can show CO2 in the air altering the rate at which energy is released by the oceans then CO2 as a climate driver comes nowhere.
Here’s another historical piece:
“Sunspots and the weather: Astonishing Discovery by Prof Bigelow – Now certain that solar storms determine meteorological conditions on Earth. Weather may be forecasted by observing the Sun.”
It was a page 1 feature from the New York Times October 28 1906.
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=1&res=9E0DE4DB1631E733A2575BC2A9669D946797D6CF
(aka http://tinyurl.com/odr8um )
At the time of the article Professor Bigelow was one of the world’s leading meteorologists; he reported his finding:
“That there is a causal connection between the observed variations in the forces of the Sun, the terrestrial magnetic field, and the meteorological elements has been the conclusion of every research into this subject for the past 50 years.”
Maybe the New York Times could rerun the article with updates from Prof Emeritus Cornelius de jager, the grandfather of modern solar physics (see here http://www.cdejager.com/about ), and the many dozens of other physicists who have published corroborative findings
Here is an obituary of Prof Bigelow who died in 1924:
http://docs.lib.noaa.gov/rescue/mwr/052/mwr-052-03-0165b.pdf
Ice free to 81.5 degrees of longitude. A graphic showing what this means would be useful?
I don’t know if anyone else follows the CET like I do – and it is a bone of contention between me and the Met Office (MO) via emails, but yet again it appears to be wildly optimistic http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcet/cet_info_mean.html The MO says the central England average so far this month is -0.8 deg c. I cannot fathom how so. I would have thought it should be something like -2.0 deg c. Last night we had -18 deg c not far from where I live (according to the MO!) and today’s daytime temperature is currently (at 1.30 pm in brilliant sunshine) -6 deg c. So the average of that 24 hours is -12 deg c. We’ve had quite a few nights that were well below freezing and hardly any counter-balancing daytime temps since the month began. The software had been down from Dec 22 until just two days ago, then they pluck a mere -0.8 deg c from somewhere! However, there’s no point in trying to take them to task over it as they just don’t reply.
John Hirsh’s claim that the Met Office predicted 10 years ago that temperatures would level off lacks any credibility. If the Met Office did so, why has it spent the past decade telling us that winters would be milder and summers hotter year after year?
Yes, long range forecasting is imperfect, but when the Met Office’s forecasts – long term, annual and seasonal – always err on the warm side, bias is clearly evident.
Hirsh’s bleating about the strength of the Met Office’s short term forecasts was pathetic. Short term forecasts of snow and ice are too bloody late for Councils that have failed to stock up on supplies of grit and salt on account of the Met Office’s seasonal forecast for a mild winter. The cost to Britain of the nation being totally unprepared for a bitter winter have been immense.
The Met Office’s forecasts have been the stuff of politics, not meteorology.
http://butnowyouknow.wordpress.com/those-who-fail-to-learn-from-history/climate-change-timeline/
Re the devolution of scientific method: A family member, a biologist, tells me that grantsmanship in her field, and doubtless in most, essentially requires that you have come to a conclusion in order to write your grant application. Basically you are asking for money to substantiate your claims, not to test an hypothesis, and certainly not to conduct basic research with the traditional aim of something interesting ‘turning up’.
Is this an inevitable consequence of turning over the funding of scientific research to government agencies, run by bureaucrats loathe to deviate from the ‘received wisdom’ of the time, and certainly not willing to go out on any limbs? I suspect so.
The question then becomes: What’s the alternative? Self-funded research in the modern age is impractical where it involves expensive equipment, laboratories, etc. And universities tie promotions and tenure to professors’ ability to bring in grants, not to do real science.
Sounds like there’s a need for private sources that will encourage basic science, unencumbered by bureaucratic rigidity or political agendas. Anyone with deep pockets want to start a foundation?
/Mr Lynn