Yet Another Incorrect IPCC Assessment: Antarctic Sea Ice Increase
by Chip Knappenberger
March 8, 2010
Another error in the influential reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports has been identified. This one concerns the rate of expansion of sea ice around Antarctica.
While not an issue for estimates of future sea level rise (sea ice is floating ice which does not influence sea level), a significant expansion of Antarctic sea ice runs counter to climate model projections. As the errors in the climate change “assessment” reports from the IPCC mount, its aura of scientific authority erodes, and with it, the justification for using their findings to underpin national and international efforts to regulate greenhouse gases.
Some climate scientists have distanced themselves from the IPCC Working Group II’s (WGII’s) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, prefering instead the stronger hard science in the Working Group I (WGI) Report—The Physical Science Basis. Some folks have even gone as far as saying that no errors have been found in the WGI Report and the process in creating it was exemplary.
Such folks are in denial.
As I document below, WGI did a poor job in regard to Antarctic sea ice trends. Somehow, the IPCC specialists assessed away a plethora of evidence showing that the sea ice around Antarctica has been significantly increasing—a behavior that runs counter to climate model projections of sea ice declines—and instead documented only a slight, statistically insignificant rise.
How did this happen? The evidence suggests that IPCC authors were either being territorial in defending and promoting their own work in lieu of other equally legitimate (and ultimately more correct) findings, were being guided by IPCC brass to produce a specific IPCC point-of-view, or both.
The handling of Antarctic sea ice is, unfortunately, not an isolated incident in the IPCC reports, but is simply one of many examples in which portions of the peer-reviewed scientific literature were cast aside, or ignored, so that a particular point of view—the preconceived IPCC point of view—could be either maintained or forwarded.
Background
The problems with the IPCC’s handling of the trends in Antarctic sea ice was first uncovered and presented a week or two ago in an article posted over at the World Climate Report—another blog with which I have been involved with for a long time.
…
The First Order Draft of Chapter 4 contained the following illustration of Southern Hemisphere sea ice, along with the caption “Sea Ice extent anomalies … the Southern Hemisphere based on passive microwave satellite data… [l]inear trend lines are indicated for each hemisphere….the small positive trend in the Southern Hemisphere is not significant. (Updated from Comiso, 2003).”
Figure 1. Figure 4.4.1b from the IPCC AR4 Chapter 4 First Order Draft.
Notice two things, 1) the figure depicts monthly ice extent anomalies from November 1978 through October 2004, and 2) the trend through them seems to be statistically significant (i.e. the confidence range does not include zero), given in the illustration as 9089.2 +/- 2970.7 km2/year or 0.735 +/- 0.240%/dec.
Yet, for some reason, the accompanying text claims that the trend in Figure 4.4.1b is insignificant (AR4 First Order Draft, page 4-14, lines 9-10):
The Antarctic results show a slight but insignificant positive trend of 0.7 ± 0.2% per decade.
This inconsistency was brought to the IPCC Chapter 4 authors’ attention by several IPCC commenters. Commentor John Church wrote “I do not understand why this trend is insignificant – it is more than three times the quoted error estimates” and Stefan Rahmstorf wrote “How can a trend of 0.7 +/- 0.2 be ‘insignificant’? Is not 0.2 the confidence interval, so it is significantly positive?” The IPCC responded to both in the same manner “Taken into account in revised text.”
And boy did they ever!
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miklos treiber (05:41:38) :
The sea ice is not being PUT IN the sea (as in a drink) it is converting sea wtaer to ice.
Mike Haseler (02:08:32) :
“I was reading the article linked to above, and I realised I had heard this all before when trying to edit wikipedia. It’s as if the same mindset is in charge of both the IPCC and wikipedia, people play along with the rules, they go along with being sidelined because you can’t insist your view gets prominence, but somehow at the end of the day, only one view ever gets to be heard.
Is there some kind of training course for global warmers in how to subvert the system to make it into their propaganda mouthpiece?”
In a word YES there is.
We farmers ran into it while dealing with the United Nations and World Trade Organization insisting we were “stakeholders” – third parties hold property in trust for the REAL owner – of our farms and livestock. The USDA tried to use this technique on farmers to get them to agree to placing Premises Identification (PI) on their deeds. PI is a permanent Encumbrance on the deed that removes Constitution protections from the property forever.
“Here’s how it works, they use the Hegellian Dialectic. This is “problem, reaction, solution”. They create the problem, watch the reaction and then provide the solution. They use seminars and the Delphi technique to bring leaders into line with their solutions.
A lot of times, the problem is completely false. They will create a problem in OUR MINDS. (Think of all the hoopla surrounding global warming recently), and then they will watch the hue and cry from the public and provide the solution via ‘policy’ for us. Inevitably, those policies are such that they contract our ability to
1) profit from our labor
2) be accountable for ourselves
3) manage our own lives and children
The group pushing this thought control is called the Aspen Institute. Their origins are in “German Intellectualism” and they have been working concertedly behind the scenes with the leaders of business, the legislators, and the judiciary since 1947 to forward their plan of nothing less than ‘global collectivism and humanism’. They have been very, very successful…”
http://truth-farmer.blogspot.com/
“Codeblue (17:38:06) :
“….Also to add: the sea ice behavior at the south pole is different than that at the north pole. While there is a significant amount of ice remaining through the summer melt season in the Arctic ice, nearly all of the Antarctic ice tends to melt…..”
ERRrrr if that is true than where did all that Ice Core data come from???
Climate and atmospheric history of the past 420000 years from the Vostok ice core, Antarctica. 1999
http://www.daviesand.com/Choices/Precautionary_Planning/New_Data/
Gail Combs (07:25:43) :
“ERRrrr if that is true than where did all that Ice Core data come from???”
From km’s thick continental ice – not from our bartenders’ ice cubes in his/her room-temp, non-salty drink 🙂
miklos treiber (05:41:38) :
“You can test this concept by simply putting ice cubes in a glass of water and observe the decrease in water level as the ice melts. therefore, the sea level will actually decrease with sea ice melt and increase with sea ice formation.”
That, milos, contradict Archimedes law.
The waterlevel will neither increase nor decrease. Just try it yourself. Make sure the level is completely level with the top of the glass.
To those saying this is not a statistically significant trend. First, the measurements are not necessarily within +/- .02. That just refers to the slope of the linear regression model fit. Which basically tracks the mean trend. A mean can be statistically significant even if the raw data is highly variable because the mean (or mean trend) is very stable if enough data is gathered. Assuming these guys did the stats correctly then I have no trouble believing a statistically significant trend exists and the best estimate of that trend is 0.735% per decade. Which sounds like a pretty small trend to me.
Sorry, Dr. Spencer’s ISH reconstruction resulted in 36% bigger anomalies than CRU, not 20%
Ref: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/20/spencer-developing-a-new-satellite-based-surface-temperature-set/#comment-323578
If the amplitude of the Antarctic Sea Ice Extent is so high that 100,000km2/decade is statistically insignificant… What would a 36% increase in variability mean for the statistical significance of the temperature trend?
Anyone?
There seems to be a lot of focus on sea ice, and it is all misplaced. The atmosphere has virtually no ability to influence sea ice. The variations in sea ice are totally due to ocean temperatures. Ocean temperatures are mysterious. The source of ocean heat is solar energy, which accumulates for decades, and geothermal heat, which accumulates for millennia. The atmosphere does not have the heat capacity to influence sea ice, and the 0.6C claimed temperature increase is miniscule compared to seasonal variations.
Gary Novak
http://nov55.com/gbwm.html
Gee if I read the grap hcorrectly + 200,000 sq km of sea ice can’t be seenor measured ?
Get Real!!.
Gary Novak (11:43:53) :
There seems to be a lot of focus on sea ice, and it is all misplaced. The atmosphere has virtually no ability to influence sea ice. The variations in sea ice are totally due to ocean temperatures.
Likely you are correct except of course during normal warming e.g. Arctic summer when ambient temps do contribute to SST increase and sea ice melt.
The gripe here is with IPCC, NASA, NOAA, GISS, etc. who continually play down expansion of Antarctic sea ice. They do so at the expense of scientific integrity – which is why increasing numbers of people disbelieve AGW theory.
“, were being guided by IPCC brass to produce a specific IPCC point-of-view, or both”
Did you mean “, or were being guided by IPCC brass to produce a specific IPCC point-of-view, or both”?
keep up the great work!
Well, in that case the moderators on WUWT have opposite views since moderator ctm opposed the name “warmer” as derogatory and preferred “proponent”:
Personally, I couldn’t care less.
“”” Steve Koch (20:53:30) :
George E. Smith,
Are you the Nobel prize winning physicist or just honoring the great man?
thanks, Steve “””
I’m just the one on every street corner. Actually, our careers have criss-crossed at least since the early 1970s; when he was doing his thing at the late great Bell Telephone Laboratories. Every time I showed up at a tech conflab, I found I was already enrolled; well on the Bell labs chap’s nickel. I happened to be VP of Reading and Dreaming for a significant (at the time) LED company. Turns out the veep for Beckman Instruments at the time also had the same name. When I worked for Fairchild in the late 60s, there were three of us at the company, and when I started work at the fore-runner of my present employer; there were two of us. We once visited a company in Toledo Ohio together; he was a sales chap (also black), which was a scream when we both introduced ourselves. But the one I honor most was a young US sailor, who dived off a capsized and burning battleship on Battleship row on the morning of Dec 7th 1941, and swam under a surface fuel fire to his survival; but horribly burned. He’s the one to remember.
But I have never actually met my Nobellist alter ego; but I am very familiar with his career, and know folks well who also know him well.
Cooler weather in Antarctica was accounted for and even predicted in IPCC IV, including floating ice increase. However, the continent itself is shedding ice through moraine drainage at an unprecedented rate, especially on the West Shelf and Pine Island.
IPCC is not a “point of view”. It is a collection of the best available science, and extensively peer reviewed. I agree that there is a problem with it, however: effects of global warming are accelerating faster than IPCC can keep up with them. We need a more nimble and contemporaneous organization.
[snip]
mike roddy (06:21:32) :
Why do you bother saying that on a site like this, don’t you read any of the Articles on here?
There are more problems accelerating faster with the IPCC than there are with Global Warming.