ANOTHER BOLD PREDICTION OF AN ICE-FREE ARCTIC
Guest post by Mark Johnson
Al Gore trumpets the latest conclusions of Climate Change Advocate David Barber. “Sea ice in Canada’s fragile Arctic is melting more quickly than anyone expected,” says University of Manitoba Prof. David Barber, the lead investigator of the Circumpolar Flaw Lead System study released Friday. Barber is the lead investigator in the largest climate change study done in Canada. Barber said before the expedition, scientists were working under the theory that climate change would happen much more slowly.
It was assumed the Arctic would be ice-free in the winter by 2100. “We expect it will happen much faster than that, much earlier than that, somewhere between 2013 and 2030 are our estimates right now. So it’s much faster than what we would expect to happen. That can be said for southern climates as well.” “We’re seeing it happen more quickly than what our models thought would happen,” Barber said.
When you read the article, notice a few things:
1) The conclusions are ALL Based on CLIMATE MODELS.
2) Canada Government paid $156-million to Barber et al for the study.
3) The Inuit population are starting to chase the cash cow as well: “There’s also the need for economic development,” Hmmmmmm.
We have finally heard from the Great Climate Change Advocate Al Gore. On his obscure blog, Al says “Its worse than we thought.” Are you kidding me?
=====================
Obscure blog? Let’s look at the numbers for Al Gore -vs- WUWT and find out.
Yup.
In fact, WUWT does pretty well when you look at the entire family of web offering by Gore’s enterprises:
Keep those hits and links coming folks. Thanks – Anthony
NOTE: In the Alexa generated graphs above, the lower number the better for traffic rank. For example in the top graph, WUWT is around the top 10,000 trafficked sites on the web while alogore.com is in the top 100,000 trafficked sites on the web. It’s RANK not HITS.
Since some commenters are confused, here is the description from Alexa:
What is Traffic Rank?
The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources, and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis. The main Alexa traffic rank is based on a value derived from these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users). The three-month change is determined by comparing the site’s current rank with its rank from three months ago. For example, on July 1, the three-month change would show the difference between the rank based on traffic during the first quarter of the year and the rank based on traffic during the second quarter.
How Are Traffic Trend Graphs Calculated?
The Trend graph shows you the site’s daily traffic rank, charted over time. The daily traffic rank reflects the traffic to the site based on data for a single day. In contrast, the main traffic rank shown in the Alexa Toolbar and elsewhere in the service is calculated from three months of aggregate traffic data.
Daily traffic rankings will sometimes benefit sites with sporadically high traffic, while the three-month traffic ranking benefits sites with consistent traffic over time. Since we feel that consistent traffic is a better indication of a site’s value, we’ve chosen to use the three-month traffic rank to represent the site’s overall popularity. We use the daily traffic rank in the Trend graphs because it allows you to see short-term fluctuations in traffic much more clearly.
It is possible for a site’s three-month traffic rank to be higher than any single daily rank shown in the Trend graph. On any given day there may be many sites that temporarily shoot up in the rankings. But if a site has consistent traffic performance, it may end up with the best ranking when the traffic data are aggregated into the three-month average. A good analogy is a four-day golf tournament: if a different player comes in first at each match, but you come in second at all four matches, you can end up winning the tournament.
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“Barber’s words, “full of holes, like Swiss cheese. We haven’t seen this sort of thing before.””
Well, that’s mibbe because they haven’t been there before at that time with millions to spend. They would have to see something they hadn’t seen before.
Robert (10:33:07
“You are absolutely wrong on that. See here: http://www.columbia.edu/~mhs119/Storms/Storms_Fig.03.gif
There is an unmistakable relationship.”
———————————————————–
Absolutely right Robert. CO2 lags temperature by about 800 years.
Now don’t come back at me with that fairy tale were CO2 takes over for the next 4000 years. Even Lewis Carroll couldn’t dream that up.
Robert (10:33:07),
Arguments like that have been debunked repeatedly here in the past, and are just as easily debunked now:
Robert: No one thinks CO2 is the sole thing that affects global temperatures
The CO2=CAGW hypothesis states that an increase in CO2 – not a change in solar irradiance, or cosmic rays, or anything similar – will result in climate catastrophe. They have to say that.
Because if, as Robert implied, CO2 is not the cause of the predicted runaway global warming [which it is not, because runaway global warming is a baseless myth], then there is no reason to spend $trillions on mitigating CO2.
Since money is the real driver of the CO2 scare, alarmists have hung their collective hats on CO2 being the culprit. Now the alarmists are fence-sitting. But we know the score: CO2 must still be demonized, because there’s big, big money at stake.
The ‘temperatures increasing in lock-step’ argument appeared when it became clear that rising CO2 wasn’t causing rising temperatures, but was instead an effect of rising temperatures. Moving the goal posts like that is typical of the alarmist arguments.
There is no agreement that CO2 leads temperature: click [note the almost zero correlation; can’t get much lower than that].
Further, the CO2/temp relationship does not match empirical observations: click. The models are falsified.
Although beneficial CO2 is rising, there is no causal relationship with CO2: click1, click2, click3
“Because the climate responds to things other than anthropogenic forcings, it doesn’t follow that anthropogenic forces are insignificant.”
In fact, anthropogenic forcings are insignificant, and can therefore be disregarded. If CO2 was the strong driver of temperature that the CAGW fanatics want everyone to believe it is, then the steady rise in CO2 would have caused rapidly rising temperatures. The opposite has happened.
Finally, Robert’s single link is too small to show that rising temperatures are a cause of rising CO2 – not an effect. Here, let me help: click
As we can easily see in that chart, CO2 rises as an effect of rising temperatures; it is not a cause.
The demonization of CO2 has been repeatedly debunked here. This is just a short summary. The WUWT archives tell the whole story.
The $156 million is not a typo per se, but in fact, a misinterpretation by the author.
This amount represents the entire budget for Canada’s IPY Program (see: http://www.api-ipy.gc.ca/pg_IPYAPI_012-eng.html; the remaining $6 million came through NSERC funding) of which Dr. Barber’s study was but a fraction.
Did anyone else think of the Manbearpig Episode of South Park when they read this post?
I’m trying to warn everybody and nobody takes me cereal!!!!
Smokey (12:03:22) :
“The CO2=CAGW hypothesis states that an increase in CO2 – not a change in solar irradiance, or cosmic rays, or anything similar – will result in climate catastrophe. They have to say that.”
That isn’t true at all, and they don’t say that. To a first approximation*, equal amounts of any forcing will have the same impact. If the solar forcing was +1 W/m^2 and the CO2 forcing was +0.1 W/m^2 over that time period, then the solar forcing would be considered much more important over that time period.
*There are subtleties here, see Hansen on ‘efficacy’. But equal amounts of TSI and CO2 forcing have nearly the same impact.
“If CO2 was the strong driver of temperature that the CAGW fanatics want everyone to believe it is, then the steady rise in CO2 would have caused rapidly rising temperatures. The opposite has happened.”
Also not true. For the current forcings, the models predict about a +0.2 C/decade rise in temperature, superimposed on the natural variability. If you look over time spans of 30+ years, you’ll see that trend emerge from the variability. If you look at a 10 year span, it will not be obvious.
carrot eater (07:24:24) :
“From this source alone, it’s impossible to tell what the basis for Barber’s prediction is.”
So, you are saying that the prediction of an ice free arctic in 2030 is based on direct observation, and not an extrapolation from a model?
Unless you insist on admitting the possibility that they traveled through time, I think we have enough evidence to make a logical inference.
Bart (12:27:51) :
It could be based on extrapolating the current observed trend, mixed with whatever feeling he got from looking at the current state of the Arctic on his trip. Sort of a guess, with no model in sight.
Until and unless he publishes the prediction within some paper, we won’t know.
Hmmmm….though thinking it deeply, it seems that the north pole decided to migrate south…
Just look through your window Al Baby!
Veronica (03:28:12) :
>I hope those people who say Al Gore invented the internet have their >/Sarc switched on?
>Sir Tim Berners-Lee has a sort of prior claim!
end quote
No – Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Wait (html and made it ‘open source’).
Lots of people were involved in the growth of a few small networks into the original internet (pre WWW days). Most of the drive came from the US military & US academic work – with a fair amount of addition by UK academic sites.
The internet had been around a while before Sir Tim made it usable by the non-geek.
Given Gore’s apparent a-technical; a-scientific capabilities I very much doubt he could have managed to find anything on the pre WWW internet; and since Sir Tim & CERN have all the WWW stuff correctly attributed; then any claim by Gore to have anything to do with the Internet is clearly fraudulent ! Now what does that remind me of – something to do with the weather ? Ah yes some nonsense about it getting warm.
Robert (10:33:07) :
Did you read Callion et.al. in Science?
No? Could be a good idea. Clearly shows that CO2 lags Temperature with 6-800 years in Vladivostoc ice-cores.
Now, how can something that lags with 6-800 years ,be the reason for the temperature to start changing in the first place?
You will need username and password;
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/299/5613/1728
Now, if you come up with that forcing argument….I have another dilemma for you;
How can temperature decrease, and CO2 decrease too, again 6-800 years lag? Think about THAT for a while……
Oh come on! In any other field or line of business, anyone who repeatedly makes false predictions as Al Gore would be either laughed at as a lunatic or put behind bars for fraud. Isn’t it time for someone with money to take him to court to try and prove he’s a fraud of the highest order and consequently put behind bars?
Robert, instead of waffling why don’t you either answer the questions or just admit that you don’t know. There have been plenty of data shown on here and other reputable sites that show no correlation between CO2 and temperature and you need look back no further than last century to see that this is the case. AGW is based only on a short period between 1979 and 1998 and the concept that the last decade was the warmest on record is absolute nonsense, it may have beeen the warmest since satellite records began only 3 decades (a meaningless statistic) ago and then only by distortions caused by “adjustment” of data and the very high spike in 1998. I’ve lived through 6 decades now and I can tell you that whatever the models and fiddled data say, the climate has seen no significant changes and there have been no rise in sea levels of any significance. We had a few abnormally warm years in the late 90s caused by a strong El Nino and that has distorted the averages.
How anybody from the extremist AGW camp can actually show their faces on public blogs since the climategate scandal broke is beyond me. Now be a good troll and go and learn something about climate change or lack of it.
carrot eater (12:27:31),
OK, then let’s leave the demonization of a harmless and beneficial trace gas out of the equation. Let’s discuss it no further, since the natural warming trend from the LIA isn’t much different that what you claim for CO2 forcing [see my chart in the post above, showing the GCMs are spectacularly wrong regarding the effect of CO2].
When you say “equal amounts of any forcing will have the same impact,” what exactly are you saying? It seems you are saying that you can adjust any ‘forcing’ until it’s equal to CO2, a meaningless statement.
To cut to the chase: CO2 must be made the fall guy. This entire CO2 scare is driven by the insatiable greed for more tax money. How can the UN, and other governments, tax solar irradiance? How can they tax a a change in cosmic rays? Answer: they can’t. So they must tax CO2, because CO2 is a byproduct of modern civilization.
To make it clear: the sale of carbon credits/offsets by governments is simply a disguised tax. If an oil company must buy carbon credits at, say, $30 a ton for the oil they produce, that adds $4 to the price of every barrel of oil.
Furthermore, the proposed tax would be levied on refined oil products, like diesel, gasoline, plastics, fertilizer, etc., similar to a value added tax [VAT] that is tacked onto every stage of production in Europe.
With such a multiplier effect, the cost of necessities will skyrocket. Our pay won’t increase, but the cost of everything will escalate enormously. The added cost taken from consumers will go into government coffers, in the biggest tax increase in the history of civilization.
So it must be CO2 – “carbon” [to the scientifically illiterate] – that is made to be the scare. The purpose is simple and straightforward: an enormous tax increase that would never, ever pass if it were proposed as a straight tax increase. In other words, the CO2 scare is a grift, and taxpayers are the marks.
If you don’t see that, you’re blind. Eat more carrots.
@rw
“How does RealClimate do on these rankings?
Any way to figure out why the Gore sites show these spikes?”
Here’s a comparison of wattsupwiththat.com, algore.com, realclimate.org, and climateaudit.org using Google trends. The scale is “Daily unique visitors” per day. Spikes in traffic volume are normally associated with noteworthy news events. For example, when the Climategate story broke in late November it caused a massive stepwise increase in traffic to all major climate blogs. That is clearly evident on the chart.
However, Gore’s blog does not even figure into the Google trends ranking because it doesn’t receive enough traffic to be meaningful or significant in any way whatsoever.
http://img251.imageshack.us/img251/8131/wuwtranking.gif
Smokey (16:12:29) :
“When you say “equal amounts of any forcing will have the same impact,” what exactly are you saying? ”
I don’t see how the statement is unclear. If a change in TSI causes a radiative imbalance of 1 W/m^2, it will cause some warming. If a change in CO2 concentrations causes a radiative imbalance of 1 W/m^2, it will have pretty much the same effect as the 1 W/m^2 of solar.
However you put together the satellite records, there is no way to get a TSI forcing that’s as strong as CO2 over the last 30 years. If anything, there’s been a slight downward trend in TSI over much of that period. So cosmic rays can’t help you, either.
I will not respond to statements about economics or politics in this thread. We are discussing physics.
“[see my chart in the post above, showing the GCMs are spectacularly wrong regarding the effect of CO2].”
You appear to have missed my discussion of that. Over a ten year period, the variability of the climate system is strong enough that the warming trend will not be statistically significant or even apparent. This is true of any ten year period in the last 30 years. You need a full 20-30 years to really see the warming signal. This is true in the GCMs as well, if you’d look at the output of a single run. They are also noisy, with lots of wiggles. Look at a 10 year period within a single run, and you won’t necessarily see much obvious trend, either. So the models are run many times, and the results averaged together to provide a cleaner average projection. But the actual Earth will show as much variability as one of the individual runs, not the cleaner average.
“Smokey (16:12:29) :
[…]
Furthermore, the proposed tax would be levied on refined oil products, like diesel, gasoline, plastics, fertilizer, etc., similar to a value added tax [VAT] that is tacked onto every stage of production in Europe.”
To clarify: Effectively it’s tacked only onto the end customer price. A business that buys raw materials, refines them into a consumer product will have to pay VAT to its suppliers and get VAT from the end consumers; it will then effectively pay the difference to the local finance office.
For certain inter-EU regulation issues this gives room for so called VAT carousel fraud; the scheme is roughly this: you get VAT compensation from your local finance office because you tell them you had to pay for imported goods from a different EU country, paying VAT into the other country. You actually did import something from a company in the neighbouring country that works together with you but that company cashes in the money and disappears before the finance office of the neighbouring country can investigate the case.
This type of fraud is mostly done with immaterial goods, escpecially with carbon credits. 90 % of the carbon trade serves this VAT racket. The volume is billions of Euros per year.
“carrot eater (12:27:31) :
[…]
Also not true. For the current forcings, the models predict about a +0.2 C/decade rise in temperature, superimposed on the natural variability. ”
For this to work somewhere an enormous amount of energy must accumulate and hide to come back with a vengance after a period of cooling. If it would simply make off into space this would destroy the trend.
So where is it hiding, carrot eater? In the oceans? In that case, why doesn’t Argo find it?
carroteater,
I wondered if that’s what you meant by “equal amounts of any forcing will have the same impact,” but I really couldn’t believe you would make that argument. It’s like saying “the energy in twenty thousand matches will push a car down the road as far as a gallon of gasoline will.” CO2 is a few matches by comparison to TSI. Prove it isn’t. I’ll sit back and watch.
Your proclamation that CO2 forcing is stronger than solar irradiance is simply an assumption, based on the always-too-high climate sensitivity estimates of CO2’s effect… s’cuse me, forcing, by alarmists.
Ever since Arrenhius, in his 1892 paper postulated a 6° climate sensitivity to CO2, the number has steadily and inexorably ratcheted downward. Even Arrenhius himself reduced it by two thirds in his 1906 paper, and Lindzen puts it at somewhere between 0.5 and 1 – in which case there is no need to worry about CO2 at all. The climate’s apparent lack of response to CO2 points to a sensitivity of 1.0; likely lower. You can read pal review papers. I’ll pay attention to what planet Earth is telling us.
And regarding your faith in computer models, it is not shared by other scientists: click
Carrot eater, please quantify the net “forcing” of CO2 over the last 10 years and the effect that it has had on surface temperatures. You use the word “strong” when temperatures have fallen which now surely nobody would dispute? The reality in my opinion is that while CO2 may be a GHG (of little real world significance) any effect it has had as CO2 levels have almost doubled is of no measurable significance. The reality is that we do not understand what is happening to climate and how we get the oscillation between glacial periods and warm periods. CO2 seemed the answer and one that could generate untold tax revenues but it patently isn’t (and that is proven by simple logic not models). The AGW juggernaut rolls on still though.
Smokey (17:21:36) :
“CO2 is a few matches by comparison to TSI. Prove it isn’t. ”
It’s just physics. Roughly speaking, it does not matter what causes a radiation imbalance of 1 W/m^2. Like it or not, it will have the same effect. (There are some subtleties here, but not important for this discussion).
“Your proclamation that CO2 forcing is stronger than solar irradiance is simply an assumption, based on the always-too-high climate sensitivity estimates of CO2’s effect… s’cuse me, forcing, by alarmists….and Lindzen puts it at somewhere between 0.5 and 1 ”
You are confused between sensitivity and forcing. The calculated forcing does *not* include any positive or negative feedbacks. Those are taken care of within the sensitivity.
I don’t think Lindzen disagrees with the basic calculation of the forcing due to CO2 (how to translate from change in CO2 concentration to forcing, in W/m^2). I don’t think you’ll find any publishing scientist who does.
What Lindzen does is propose negative feedbacks which reduce the sensitivity. But that applies to any forcing. If the TSI forcing increased by 1 W/m^2, Lindzen would still claim that the models would overestimate the resulting temperature rise.
So appealing to Lindzen does not help you in the point you are trying to make.
Well, Al Gore got Teapot Dome, or whatever they’re calling it to distance it from the scandal under President Harding.
http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/history/A0848032.html
And that’s without going into Armand Hammer or Occidental Petroleum (Oxy-Pete). Funny thing was, his father was know as the Senator from Oxy-Pete (Armand Hammer bragged that he had him in his back pocket, wallet). Al Gore, Jr., was known as the, original, Senator from Likud. (Some time before Lieberman became thus affiliated.)
“You use the word “strong” when temperatures have fallen which now surely nobody would dispute?”
Virtually everybody would dispute that assertion. The Oughts were the warmest decade on record. This year (although it is early days yet) is on pace to break the all-time record: http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/
carrot eater (12:51:21) :
It could be based on extrapolating the current observed trend, mixed with whatever feeling he got from looking at the current state of the Arctic on his trip. Sort of a guess, with no model in sight.”
Sorry, no points awarded. To calculate a trend is to apply a 1st order polynomial model to the data set.
Robert, I’m still waiting for answers to my questions, don’t be shy now I won’t laugh too hard. I can’t open and use the link you sent me but it’s irrelevant anyway. Post ’98 is coming down from a strong El Nino inspired abnormal high and I’ve seen enough evidence now to be certain that temperatures are falling whatever the average is doing. Whatever, it is meaningless because the question is not whether there is warming or cooling but what is causing it. Whatever has happened there is not a shred of evidence that it was caused by Anthropogenic CO2. AGW, remember, is a hypothesis (it doesn’t make theory let alone law) and a weak one for which there is no observable verification.