By charles the moderator
From the “No matter what happens we can attribute it to Anthropogenic Climate Change” Department.
In a story in physorg.com James Overland of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, makes a few claims which will give some of our readers pause.
While it may seem counter-intuitive, warmer Arctic climes caused by climate change influence air pressure at the North Pole, shifting wind patterns in such a way as to boost cooling over adjacent swathes of the planet.
“Cold and snowy winters will be the rule rather than the exception,” said James Overland of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Continued rapid loss of ice will be an important driver of major change in the world’s climate system in the coming years, he said at an Olso meeting of scientists reviewing research from the two-year International Polar Year 2007-2008.
The exceptionally chilly winter of 2009-2010 in temperate zones of the northern hemisphere were connected to unique physical processes in the Arctic, he said.
“The emerging impact of greenhouse gases in an important factor in the changing Arctic,” he explained in a statement.
“What was not fully recognized until now is that a combination of an unusual warm period due to natural variability, loss of sea ice reflectivity, ocean heat storage, and changing wind patterns all working together to disrupt the memory and stability of the Arctic climate system,” he said.
The region is warming more than twice as fast as the rest of the planet, a phenomenon known as Arctic amplification.
Resulting ice loss is significantly greater than earlier climate models predicted.
The polar ice cap shrank to its smallest surface since records have been kept in 2007, and early data suggests it could become even smaller this summer.
Source here. Bolding mine.
Now just over a year ago, NOAA put this out, again quoting Overland.
“The Arctic is changing faster than anticipated,” said James Overland, an oceanographer at NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory and co-author of the study, which will appear April 3 in Geophysical Research Letters. “It’s a combination of natural variability, along with warmer air and sea conditions caused by increased greenhouse gases.”
Overland and his co-author, Muyin Wang, a University of Washington research scientist with the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean in Seattle, analyzed projections from six computer models, including three with sophisticated sea ice physics capabilities. That data was then combined with observations of summer sea ice loss in 2007 and 2008.
The area covered by summer sea ice is expected to decline from its current 4.6 million square kilometers (about 1.8 million square miles) to about 1 million square kilometers (about 390,000 square miles) – a loss approximately two-fifths the size of the continental U.S. Much of the sea ice would remain in the area north of Canada and Greenland and decrease between Alaska and Russia in the Pacific Arctic.
“The Arctic is often called the ‘Earth’s refrigerator’ because the sea ice helps cool the planet by reflecting the sun’s radiation back into space,” said Wang. “With less ice, the sun’s warmth is instead absorbed by the open water, contributing to warmer temperatures in the water and the air.”
Bolding mine. Source again here. So… while this is not a direct contradiction, it is sort of a morphing of ideas. To paraphrase the what was not fully recognized.
We used to think that a warming Arctic with melting ice would be part of a warming trend, but instead, we got a lot of snow and cold weather, so the warming Arctic kinda messed with all those, you know, patterns and stuff like that we expected like. So that snow and rain and cold and other stuff we didn’t predict or expect… you know what I’m sayin’? It was caused by, you know, the crazy mixed up stuff caused by all that melting and warming and stuff, yeah…that’s it.
or to phrase it another way:
AGW moves in mysterious ways.
But the money shot is here from the physorg.com article.
It is unlikely that the Arctic can return to its previous condition, Overland said. The changes are irreversible.
It is likely someone will remind Dr. Overland of that statement in a few years.
h/t “K”
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It makes you wonder how THIS became reversible. It makes you wonder whether the President of the Royal Society had a little too much Scotch before talking such gibberish in 1817:
Enjoy the Holocene and the thicker than expected Arctic ice.
“What was not fully recognized until now is that a combination of an unusual warm period due to natural variability, loss of sea ice reflectivity, ocean heat storage, and changing wind patterns all working together to disrupt the memory and stability of the Arctic climate system,” he said.
=========================
Memory and stability?
Disappointment awaits anyone looking for memory or stability, on this planet.
BTW, what does “memory” mean?
Whatever happens next, I predicted it. And even if I didn’t, I reserve the right to post-predict the past as if I did. The models do not lie; they have 20-20 hindsight and so does my robust crystal ball.
Thomas says:
June 13, 2010 at 3:12 pm
“The Arctic has a memory?”
One could look at ice as a sort of memory. Wonder how many Gigabytes it is, really?
The Earth has warmed a bit. It will cool a bit soon. It does that.
But this is what is getting mighty interesting.
It is possible that the natural driver of our climate, this highly variable and out of balance Earth, with its ever changing and leaky atmosphere and oceans, keeping it warm here, letting it cool there, will be the downfall of our current set of politicians, and if it is, they will never see the light of the rotunda again, nor anyone who dares to claim the same political party.
Given that, it seems to me that our current crop of politicians are placing a mighty big bet on a modeled theory that an increase in a tiny fraction of CO2 in the atmosphere, of which a tinier piece has been placed there by us, is the driver of our recent rather whimpy warming, instead of Earth.
I do know this. I lost a bet because of my vote, thinking that smarter heads would prevail. I won’t make that mistake again.
Oh come on…..it wasn’t that long ago they were saying kids would grow up not knowing snow. Now snow Is going to be the norm? Have these people no shame? What will they say when there’s below average snowfall this winter? They can’t have it both ways. Either they understand climate change and they can make accurate predictions or they don’t. And if they don’t know what they are talking about then they should stop spouting nonsense until they figure it out.
Like I’ve said before, if it gets any warmer, we’ll all freeze to death.
For some reason, when I read about some of those hysteria-mongers, I get a glimpse of Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels in “Dumb and Dumber”.
My question is, when the inevitable cycle of climate change takes us into an indisputable cooling period, how will they blame that on our CO2? I’m convinced they will.
This ain’t nothing but a confidence trick. They predict EVERYTHING and atribute any weather changes to climate change in order that the ‘theory’ can never be falsified. Think about it. 30 years of brutal NH winter snows will not be able to falsify it!!!! Thirty years of ‘normal’ conditions cannot falsify it. Thirty years of relative lack of snow will merely confirm it!!!
Now they wonder why people are becoming increasingly sceptical. In years to come AGW is going to enter the museum of scientific hoaxes ahead of Piltdown man.
You can’t fool all of the people all of the time.
Temps in the Arctic were roughly as high in the 1940s.
And there is an phenomenon call Polar Amplification where it seems that the Arctic and the Antarctic temperatures swing by twice as much as the global temperatures. That also means they swing down twice as much as in the 1970s when Arctic temperatures were about 2.0C lower than the 1940s. We also see this pattern in the paleoclimate records as well with twice as much temp change at the poles in the ice ages for example or the longer-term proxy records.
GISTemp for global, mid-latitude, tropics and Arctic temperatures.
http://www.columbia.edu/~mhs119/Temperature/T_moreFigs/zonalT.gif
And some of the change is the result of natural cycles. Compare the GISTemp monthly data for 64N to 90N versus the Raw undetrended Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) figures [I used the Raw undetrended AMO data just to show the correlation a little better and then I smoothed GISTemp over 5 months because it is so variable].
http://img33.imageshack.us/img33/2866/amorawarctictemps.png
joel says: “How much sunlight actually hits the ground in the high latitudes, anyway?”
By “ground,” I assume you mean the Earth’s surface. Sunlight does illuminate the Arctic 24 hours a day in the summertime. On a square foot basis, the incident radiation is small compared to the equator because of the low angle of incidence. Sunlight has to pass through an atmosphere about 2.4 times as thick as at the equator, too, so it’s even less intense. There may be more scattering, too, at that zenith angle.
But wern’t they telling us, up to some years ago, that our children would not know what snow is? Now they’re telling us that we will be getting more snow and more cold. They don’t knoe a single thing about what’s happening to our climate. The key sentence in James Overland’s report is the following: “What was not fully recognized until now ………” Yeah, what was not recognised until now is that your twenty year old AGW theory was a fairy tale and now its dead. Mouth to mouth resuscitation procedure will not get it back to breath, nor more BS. Admit it and go home, love your family, and tell them that the planet and humanity have a future together. And be happy.
“kwik says:
Thomas says:
June 13, 2010 at 3:12 pm
“The Arctic has a memory?”
One could look at ice as a sort of memory. Wonder how many Gigabytes it is, really?”
Technically, a state is a memory. Thus, every material system is a memory. The Wolters Pilsener can on my table is a memory – it memorizes how much i already drank. I doubt that our climatologist meant it this way, his statement sounds vaguely Lovelockian, maybe he wants to elevate himself into the higher echelon of climate change profits and sell overprized chinese-made trinkets to visitors of esoterian trade fairs.
Oh, BTW, i found a nice wiki that tracks the trails of esoteric c*nmen:
http://www.esowatch.com
You people are far too harsh on poor Overland. If you had a videotape of him making these pronouncements and you looked very very carefully, you would have seen James Hansen crouched behind Overland with his hand up James ar*e, kinda like a puppet show.
sounds familiar If we have warm winters its because of global warming, and if we have colder snowier winters its because of global warming. Again all bases are covered so that global warming will always be in the news.
As the great Yogi Berra once said “I really didn’t say everything I said”.
Really, is there anything at all that AGW can be pinned down on? Nothing seems to be falsifiable.
ShrNfr says:
June 13, 2010 at 3:17 pm
Generational Memory – or lack thereof – you have it dead on.
Sadly, I watch it play out on a daily basis in the computer industry. Most of the old timers have hung up their coding forms, put the pencils away, and thrown out the printouts, now the second generation is retiring, and we’re starting to see huge mistakes in code design and architecture that the “new systems” were supposed to prevent. The single most common mistake in programming today, is the same as it was in the ’50s. Use of variables without initializing them. Of course, object oriented code makes that impossible – right!
Didn’t anyone tell people leaving the hard stuff until later is the way you fail? /rant
Maybe that’s how the climatologists got lost, they’ve been leaving the hard stuff – clouds, volcanoes, multi-decade oscillations, until later, when they have more money.
From today’s news:
5 feet of snow … in the middle of June? Wow!
Opps, forgot reference for my preceding comment:
http://cbs4denver.com/wireapnewswy/Wyoming.emergency.crews.2.1748801.html
Co2 causes more snow, colder weather as well as less snow and warmer weather.
This is what happens when scientist sell their soles for a piece of gold and invest in “Green Energy Industries” that are heavily subsidized by government.
To me, it’s pure greed.
Well holy smokes! All these years I thought it was the cold that turned water into ice. I guess I ought to put those ice trays in the oven! 😉
Gail,
Hold onto your straw hat, girl. They are bringing Amplifiers to use wave patterns to break up the ice as it is not doing what it is suppose to do.
Hence, they will be right one way or another.
Yesterday, Seattle had its first day above 75 THIS YEAR. An all time record. A veritable heat wave as we’ve been doing well to hit 70.
as one great cartoon (of commuters stuck in a snow drift) cheer put:
what do we want? global warming
when do we want it? NOW
Every generation tries to reinvent the wheel. After much pain and failed experimentation they discover the wheel their father used and think wow. Some of the older and retired paleogeologists etc have the answers and are currently being derided by the new generation of whiz kids. Soon they will wake up and find the old data and say wow. Apparently NASA had some data referring to the warming/cooling on the moon in prep for the Apollo missions. Apparently that information was ignored by the current crop of NASA scientists. Expect a wow moment soon.
“Overland and his co-author, Muyin Wang, a University of Washington research scientist with the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean in Seattle, analyzed projections from six computer models, including three with sophisticated sea ice physics capabilities. That data was then combined with observations of summer sea ice loss in 2007 and 2008.”
Models, models, models! When will these overpaid AGW zealots and climate shamans ever actually learn anything new, switch off their nonsensical computer games and actually go and have a look for themselves as to what is happening in the real world ?
Reminds me of a long ago regional airport that in those days had the usual resident weather forecaster.
At this particular airport he was located in a brick, windowless building.
Happily broadcasting away one day to incoming aircraft that the official met office local aviation weather was CAVOK, ie; clear with unlimited visibility.
Until a frustrated pilot told him in language that was anything but polite to stick his f**** head out the door and have a ff’ing look for himself.
Silence!
A minute or so later; Amended forecast! Heavy rain and poor and deteriorating visibility in local area .
Would advise caution for all aircraft due to deteriorating weather conditions.
At least that forecaster actually learn’t something and was prepared to shift ground quite dramatically unlike the current batch of AGW advocate climate modeling shamans.
rbateman says:
100′s of millions of people on this planet get the end result: warming Peter Popsickle Land to freeze the crud out of Paul Pedestrian Land.
You forgot about Mary Proletariat, She will go fridget !