Guest post by Verity Jones
Man is not the primary cause of change in the Arctic says book by Russian scientists
Forget the orthodox view of Arctic climate change – this book has a very different message. (h/t to WUWT commenter Enneagram)
Published last year, this is a synthesis of work by the Russian Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI). It sets out the data and experience of scientists over 85 years, drawing together much already published in the area. For a book that is billed under a climate change heading, this is actually more an antidote to the hype usually associated with warming in the Arctic. A few pages of each chapter are available on-line and even that is well worth reading; no doubt even better in its entirety.
The Preface sets the tone of the book very clearly – “.…scientists have predicted a significant decrease in sea-ice extent in the Arctic and even its complete disappearance in the summertime by the end of the 21st century. This monograph presents results of studies of climatic system changes in the Arctic, focused on ice cover, that do not justify such extreme conclusions.” “Many studies and international projects, such as the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA), attribute the air temperature increase during the last quarter of the 20th century exclusively to accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. However these studies typically do not account for natural hydrometeorological fluctuations whose effects on multiyear variability, as this monograph shows, can far exceed the anthropogenic impact on climate.”
The book begins by examining the major effects of the Polar Ice caps and their overall stability on Earth’s climate – affecting albedo, and regulating the heat flux from the sea to atmosphere. Climate variations are discussed and the WMO’s “30 year average” definition of climate is not considered applicable in the Arctic because fluctuations in the polar climate are so large.
Chapter 2 looks at what is known about changes in sea ice in the 20th century. The Russian data sets probably hold the most extensive information available for the first half of the century due to interest in the Northern Sea Route in the 1930s. In addition, measurements of ice thickness also go back to the middle of the 1930s when they were taken regularly for coast-bound ice at many of the Polar stations.
It is particularly interesting what they say about Arctic air temperatures (Chapter 4). “Periodic cooling and warming events are evident in air temperature fluctuations in the Arctic during the 20th century, similar to changes in ice cover.” A cool period at the beginning of the 20th century was followed by what is commonly referred to as the “Arctic Warming Period” in the 1920s-1940s. Relative cooling was widespread between the late 1950s to late 1970s, followed by the current warming period peaking in recent years. Gridded average temperature anomalies for 70°-85°N produce a curve that fits a polynomial trend to the sixth power and the cycle periodicity is 50-60 years (Figure 4.1). Other indicators in Arctic and Antarctic support this cycle and show its global nature. On the subject of polar amplification, whereby weather and climate variability increase with latitude, a number of models and explanations are discussed. None of these involve CO2.
The authors point out there is an abundance of hypotheses as to the possible causes of climate and ice variation and climate change (a ‘long-term’ phenomenon) but these lack detailed long-term data. They state “where data do exist, we should prefer data to computer models”; they believe model projections of future ice area fluctuations are unreliable. Actually, they have some deliciously scathing remarks about climate models.
“The models neglect natural fluctuations because they have no means of incorporating them, and put the entire blame for climate changes since the 19th century on human activity.”
On possible future changes they predict that “..in the 21st century, oscillatory (rather than unidirectional) ice extent changes will continue to dominate Arctic seas.” A new ice maximum in 2030-2035 is predicted (Figure 6.1) and this will have major implications for shipping in the region.
From the results of spectral analyses, they conclude that there are 50-60 year cycles and less prevalent ones at 20 years, 8-12 years and 2-3 years. These are closely related to variations in general atmospheric circulation. In the longer term the decreasing trend of ice extent may be a segment of a 200 year cyclic variation responsible for the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age. Much of the discussion about solar effects is behind the paywall for the book, however there are some strong conclusions about solar effects on Arctic climate. Despite the small variation in Total Solar irradiance (TSI) through solar cycles, solar activity may have a greater effect on high latitudes because of interaction with the Earth’s magnetic field. Solar system “dissymmetry” (barycentre) influences are also mentioned as closely corresponding to the 60 year cycles.
The authors conclude that the simulation by the general circulation models does not appear to reflect the cyclic features in Arctic ice extent and climate, and, if their cyclic interpretations of climate variation are correct, ice cover will continue to fluctuate as there is little connection with the anthropogenic burning of fossil fuels.
Climate Change in Eurasian Arctic Shelf Seas: Centennial Ice Cover Observations. Authors: Ivan E. Frolov, Zalmann M. Gudkovich, Valery P. Karklin, Evgeny G. Kovalev, and Vasily M. Smolyanitsky. Published by Springer/Praxis (2009) ISBN 9783540858744
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Verity is one of WUWT’s moderators and contributors. She also has her own website at Digging in The Clay. Be sure to visit it and bookmark it – Anthony
Sheeesh!
These Russians! What part of “the Science is Settled” don’t they understand?
They should stop all these measurements (looking at “rotten ice”, no doubt) and concentrate on understanding the genius “models” that give full explanation of why we need to throw the remainder of the economy under the next bus that passes.
I’m sure Phil Jones and Gavin could help. /sarc
I learnt this from “The Lion King” (Walt Disney Studios). The great circle of life!
Appears fascinating, but $100 for a 166-page book is a high hurdle…….
Hi,
[snip – If this is a legal copy, fine, repost and explain. If not, we cannot encourage piracy. And in case it is piracy, I cannot allow this link to remain in the interim; if it is not, I am sorry but I am sure you will understand. ~ Evan]
The Cold War all over again! Damn those Ruskies haven’t they heard of Al Gore?
PapyJako says
——————–
I have just dowloaded the complete book in pdf form from here
——————–
Does thus mean the copy at the URL you provided is pirated and you just ripped off the Russian authors and encouraged others to do the same?
The Russians have suffered from group think at least as much, if not more than, western scientists. I had the pleasure of doing my graduate research in Russia in 1990’s and saw a bit of that with the scientists within my field, but this was changing rapidly during then.
An interesting difference though was that having dealt with Soviet style group think when the west was experiencing the results of relatively unfettered scientific freedom, their younger scientists understood better than our current crop of illuminated minds just how destructive their brand of group think was to their society. The result is a tolerance for debate that we should pay close attention to.
I find it amusing that we are hearing about this publication now, a full year after its publication. I wonder how many of the Russian climate negotiators in Copenhagen were aware of this work? How many Chinese and Indians ones too?
Unseasonal snow falls in S E Australia. Snow falls down to 500 metres have been reported in parts of Victoria, New South Wales and Tasmania with temperatures down to 15 deg C below average for this time of year.
Also, after our prolonged drought, rainfall in this part of the world has been above average for most of the country since around July 2009, with the last couple of months rainfall in many areas double the LTA.
Figure 4.1:
http://www.springerlink.com/fulltext-explorer/backend.asmx/GetFullPageImage?&pageNum=2&resourceID=649444&width=750&height=infer&blackBox=
looks oddly familiar:
http://hidethedecline.eu/media/Northern%20hemisphere%20temperatures/crumat.jpg
LazyTeenager says:
October 16, 2010 at 12:40 am
“Does thus mean the copy at the URL you provided is pirated and you just ripped off the Russian authors and encouraged others to do the same?”
I do not understand why you raise such an accusation on me !…
[snip – see reply2]
Regards.
[REPLY – If this is legal, and okay by the authors, fine. If not . . . well, it’s not a cheap book and I don’t want to see the authors lose out. ~ Evan]
REPLY2: I’m going to be on the side of the authors here, we don’t encourage copyright violations of author’s IP, and while these links you provide may be unfettered, they may only be so because the exist outside of the authors home country law jurisdiction. Bottom line if you want the book, it is available on Amazon at the link above, or you can locate it yourself. WUWT won’t provide download links.- Anthony
# “Man is not the primary cause of change in the Arctic says book by Russian scientists”
That may be the case for the most recent changes, but is doubted in regard of the “Arctic Warming Period” in the 1920s-1940s, by another book published also in 2009, titled: “Arctic Heats Up. Spitsbergen 1919 to 1939”, (IUniverse, US-ISBN: 978-1-4401-4087-7), which discusses in Chapter 8 (p. 87 –96) the role the naval war and its devastating activities around Great Britain during WWI from 1914-1918 might have had on the ocean water that travels northwards to the Arctic Ocean eventually as warm West Spitsbergen Current, which was presumably the main source of the heating up of the Arctic than, particularly of the winter seasons from 1919 to 1939. More at: http://www.arctic-heats-up.com/chapter_8.html
The book’s concluding remarks are (p.96) :
____….We could demonstrate a case where the correlation of events, magnitude, space, location, and timing, are so closely intertwined that one is forced to assume that the connection is inevitably the source of causation. That is called a prima facie evidence. And a prima facie evidence between the naval war activities in West Europe waters and the system shift to the West Spitsbergen Current in the sea area off Spitsbergen could be established. That is not necessarily a 100% proof, but it is enough to require from every claim, otherwise dissembling the demonstrated strong correlation, and establishing another, more solid, evidential conclusion. As there can be no doubt that only the warm Atlantic water in the West Spitsbergen Current could have initiated the big Spitsbergen warming in the late 1910s, and sustain it in the region for two decades, the naval war thesis can only be challenged with conclusive evidence that the dramatic system shift in the Northern north Atlantic stand in correlation with another event, respectively the system shift in the current was ‘natural’. But due to the strong correlation with WWI, this cannot only be merely claimed, but the claimant should establish such claim on solid proof.”
Russians! [snip] do they know about The Arctic?
Arctic Ice can only be studied by those with third hand experience,..eg in Houston, Pennsylvania and stuff. Places where it gets real cold in the winter.
It must be emphasized, that cold polar regions should see most warming under the premise of “warming, caused by accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere”, since cold air holds only a little water vapor and increase in CO2 should play relatively bigger part in overall “GH effect” than in tropics or medium latitudes.
From real data, it is obvious that “accumulation of greenhouse gases” has no visible effect in the most sensitive region (in Antarctic it is even worse than expected, since it is cooling during the satellite era). The AGW scare is bases SOLELY on 30-year warming trend, which is a part of bigger natural cycle and similar warming occurred also in 1910-1945. That’s why I do not believe that CO2 has any visible effect on temperatures, even those 0.6 deg C for pure CO2.
Compare the climate models with the Arctic reality:
http://i43.tinypic.com/14ihncp.jpg
The models do not capture the AMO-like variation at all and are just hand-tuned to fit the 1975-2005 trend, while the correlation breaks before and after.
I think Arctic temperature may not go down too much for prolong period of time. Scenario, which I think is likely, is that inflow of warm waters into Arctic to be either constant or on a gentle rise, and equivalent amount of the cold arctic water returning back into the Labrador sea. This would keep Arctic at levels similar to the current, while pushing jet-stream further south than normal, resulting in much colder areas further south.
” Latimer Alder says:
October 16, 2010 at 1:39 am
Arctic Ice can only be studied by those with third hand experience,..eg in Houston, Pennsylvania and stuff. Places where it gets real cold in the winter.”
And to study sea ice you have to be as far from the sea as possible, some place like Colorado. No wonder they always get it wrong.
“The models neglect natural fluctuations because they have no means of incorporating them”
This is only true for simple deterministic models. It is not true for the more complex GCMs used in IPCC AR4. Unforced (natural) variability in the models arises from the stochastic nature of the models. For example, I have a 600 year unforced model run that contains many cycles in model climate.
This is what I pointed out yesterday in Watts’ response to Tamino here.
I also pointed to examples of historic variations in sea ice going back hundreds to thousands of years here.
This is why Warmists insist on the post 1979 satellite record to make their case. The further back you go the less unusual the recent receding Arctic ice looks.
That impolite lazy teenager seems to be all mouth & trousers, yet distinctly lacking in testicular fortitude. It (no sex please) gobs off its comments like an Essex girl.
“What is the difference between an Essex girl and a computer? You only have to punch the information into a computer once!”
The temperatures are completely wrong. They haven’t been homogenized/Hansenized yet.
It will also be interesting to see how Dr Foster’s statistical genius deals with this one.
There’s the Polar Reserch Institute at Cambridge UK, Lensfield Road, which
Has there been a word from this source about this book?
The headquarters of the BAS is in Madingley Road, Cambridge. Interesting that the book takes modelling particularly to task.
Juraj V. says:
October 16, 2010 at 1:41 am
The models do not capture the AMO-like variation at all
Not so. See http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v3/n10/full/ngeo955.html
Sorry, but I stoped reading after
What do they want to tell me? They had a poly… and the then measured data fits… now a cycle appears… and a trend… an even power… 6?
No, it’s at least a poly to the 17th… and odd! And if a poly, no cycles.
“Gridded average temperature anomalies for 70°-85°N produce a curve that fits a polynomial trend to the sixth power and the cycle periodicity is 50-60 years”
Oh, come on! Periodicity of 50-60 years claimed from little more than one and a half wavelengths of data!
Some people see cycles in almost anything. But then, some people see faces in clouds.
Strange that their graph of their “curve that fits a polynomial trend to the sixth power” starts in 1990 and indicates that temperatures in the late 19th century were much higher than in the early 20th, contrary to the available evidence.
But at least their graph does predict not just “a new ice maximum in 2030-2035” but also a rapid decline in 70°-85°N temperatures starting around 2011. So, we shall see fairly soon.
Yet another temperature record away from the urban influence and EU/American homogenisation that shows recent temperatures to be similar to that in the 30’s. Take the 50 year oscillation out and it has almost flatlined since multiple measurements start around 1910.
Hmm, chances of anything from this book appearing in future IPCC publications?
Anyone dropped a copy into Tammy, see how “Open Minded” he is about this?
Rabe says:
October 16, 2010 at 3:25 am
Hmmm – so if you measured say light intensity outside, and made a high order polynomial fit to it, and found an oscillation, this would show that night and day were an illusion and an artefact of naive maths?
Hey Tamino (Grant Foster) – here’s Arctic data more than 6 years back.
There is tons of ice research buried in the Russian archives that has never seen the light of day in western circles, being published or written in Cyrillic. In the late 60s I was spending a lot of time on snow literature, and by far the most detailed and voluminous research was Russian, even on snow alone. The Russians have had a pragmatic and strategic interest in ice and snow for decades. Nobody knows more about north polar ice aand snow then the Russians. Nobody.
Maybe these guys could explain how HMS Investigator managed to sail to its final resting place in 1853, as Grant Foster can’t/won’t, and the models of history produced by the Hockey Team certainly don’t.
Maybe Grant Foster and The Hockey Team would prefer the alien spaceship theory to accepting that their science does not permit any other explanation
Excellent synopsis, Verity.
So, so far I can see the ENSO 2-3yr cycle, the 12 year would be close enough to the sunspot cycle, the 20 year would be close enough to the 18.6 year lunar cycle, the 200 year possibly the deVries (PDF) cycle which lines up with Sporer, Maunder and Dalton minimums, and whose next one is due about now.
The sixty year cycle is the most fascinating, because everywhere I see temp reconstructions, it’s there. Would this be Jupiter and Saturn lining up with Earth? Looking here, they don’t seem to really line up in a way that would have an effect on Earth at the important dates.
If we can find the underlying cause of that cycle, I think we’ll go a long way to figuring out our “climate”. No CO2 involved.
richard telford says:
October 16, 2010 at 2:07 am
“The models neglect natural fluctuations because they have no means of incorporating them”
This is only true for simple deterministic models. It is not true for the more complex GCMs used in IPCC AR4. Unforced (natural) variability in the models arises from the stochastic nature of the models. For example, I have a 600 year unforced model run that contains many cycles in model climate.
Its good to know that stochastic models are exhibiting cycles – its just that they are not the right cycles.
There is very little chance of a model being useful as a predictive tool for reality as the chaotic interacting systems that make up the climate are not all known and many of their inputs are not understood or unknown. Even relatively obvious and high impact issues such as the effects of clouds are not yet understood or quantified despite the entire AGW hypothesis relying on hyrdologic cycle feedbacks. A chaotic climate model would need to have very accurate starting values for all the variables that affect climate miss one input or get the timing, periodicity or scaling wrong for an input in a chaotic system and it will rapidly deviate from the real world it is trying to model.
All the models have proven is that climate system cycles can appear out of a chaotic system.
phlogiston: …naive maths?
Umm, …yep. My experience is that most natural phenomena map either (partly) to a polynomial order of at most 3 or are cyclic (for which one would use fourier analysis) or are chaotic (for which one would better give up) or the sum of some of those.
Guess my preference on this topic. 😉
It seems cyclic … I wonder why.
richard telford says:
October 16, 2010 at 2:07 am
“This is only true for simple deterministic models. It is not true for the more complex GCMs used in IPCC AR4. Unforced (natural) variability in the models arises from the stochastic nature of the models. For example, I have a 600 year unforced model run that contains many cycles in model climate.”
What code are you running, Richard? What equations are being solved? What boundary conditions, initial conditions? Is there complete documentation someplace?
There is a geopolitical fight brewing over parts of the Arctic which has little to do with science, of course. Canada is enforcing licensing of foreign vessels in waters it claims, Norway is moving forward with oil exploration, Russia is moving forward with updating its nuclear-powered icebreaker fleet and Russian, American and Canadian claims overlap. The US icebreaker fleet is out of commission currently, from what I’ve read. Part of the cover story uses the idea that AGW will open up the Arctic to shipping, but frozen or not, they want to rape the resources asap.
Rabe says: (October 16, 2010 at 5:34 am )
“My experience is that most natural phenomena map either (partly) to a polynomial order of at most 3 or are cyclic (for which one would use fourier analysis) or are chaotic (for which one would better give up) or the sum of some of those.”
Don’t just read my summary. They do use wavelet analyses (check out pages 18-20 which you can read in the preview on Google Books, but not on the Springer site) and this is mentioned in the conclusions as how they arrived at the 50-60 year cycles and less prevalent ones at 20 years, 8-12 years and 2-3 years.
Re Paulhan 0505am and the 60-year cycle, Scafetta has a 2010 paper which also uses a 60-year (and 20-year, and quadratic) cycle which is tentatively attributed to Jupiter-Saturn modulation of solar processes, in an unspecified manner.
Thus does astronomy turn, in some sense, into astrology, i.e. an influence on humans by the planets, via very tenuous connections.
Rich.
richard telford says:
October 16, 2010 at 2:56 am
Juraj V. says:
October 16, 2010 at 1:41 am
The models do not capture the AMO-like variation at all
Not so. See http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v3/n10/full/ngeo955.html
Not sure how this proves your case without admitting more error. The paper talks about the primary drivers of the Atlantic sea temperatures being volcanic activity and external solar forcings. Not sure how the models take this into considerations since temperature series’s have been omitting the waves and troughs of climate for awhile now due to “massaging of the data.”
Dr. Hansen years ago started smoothing the multidecadel data, and the reasoning is correct when trying to figure out a climate picture you would want to smooth out 60 year cycles, but when you are modeling using GCM philosophy of boundary condition, this smoothing introduces error that can not be removed. But that error is a different story….the fact remains that GCM’s are built based on the multidecadel data being smoothed to a fraction of its original, so any assumptions including effects of carbon dioxide on sea temperatures will be especially wrong.
As I have stated previously, building models like this makes them incredibly unreliable outside of 60 year windows where they have a shot at being close. And attempting to predict temperatures in any specific area of the world….good luck with that. And so we go on with the argument about boundary conditions versus initial state, but boundary condition systems have never been found to provide reliable results for small portions of the system. That is just not what they are designed for. They are a big picture system that sees the system as a whole, but might get entire areas wrong. That is if the input is correct and other assumptions are correct too..
Doug @ 12:42 AM
Yes, it is my impression that the intransigence of the BRICs at Copenchaos was from strong doubt as to the anthropogenic effect on climate. It seems that they were playing along with the charade as a strategy to shakedown the developed West over its imagined carbon guilt. The strategy failed, but their chagrin over its failure was masked by their outburst of outrage over the backroom deal promoted by the thug mentality of one Western leader in particular. Whoa, did he play his unintended and hamstrung part.
===================
I disagree. Al Gore knows more than the Ruskies. He said that the Arctic could be free of ice by 2013. /sarc off
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2007/gore-lecture_en.html
Here’s the source for Al Gore’s belief. All these fools are soon going to end up with egg on their faces.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7139797.stm
Ian W says: October 16, 2010 at 5:16 am
A chaotic climate model would need to have very accurate starting values for all the variables that affect climate miss one input or get the timing, periodicity or scaling wrong for an input in a chaotic system and it will rapidly deviate from the real world it is trying to model.
It does not have to be a linear model to be useful. Tsonis et all have been using neural net analogues of the oceanic currents and are getting fairly good descriptions of nature. Unfortunately the idea has not been attractive to the rest of climate modelers. I believe it is the way modeling should go.
One will not get exact numbers, but will get attractors and track trajectories, i.e. ranges in the parameter space. The GCMs think they are simulating this with their large number of runs, on their linear models, but that is nonsense.
richard telford says:
October 16, 2010 at 2:07 am
“The models neglect natural fluctuations because they have no means of incorporating them”
“This is only true for simple deterministic models. It is not true for the more complex GCMs used in IPCC AR4. Unforced (natural) variability in the models arises from the stochastic nature of the models. For example, I have a 600 year unforced model run that contains many cycles in model climate.”
I see that you have reasonably well-confirmed physical hypotheses about natural regularities which underly the natural fluctuations and that you have programmed them into a GCM so that you can learn more about what they imply. That’s nice, but the really valuable part of your work is in the physical hypotheses that you have used to explain and predict these natural regularities. Give us those. We are not interested in the models.
Paul Coppin – A relative who was , for many years, a CPO on several US Navy subs,
said:”The Russians know more about cold and ice,than George Hamilton knows “Toasted”..” For those who aren’t familiar George was famous for his tanning habits.
later made commercials for a Taco Chip co…
Do not discount Russians. They still are space and seafarers, the US is Navel Gazing now…
maelstrom
Russia is also building floating nuclear power plants for use in the Arctic. Oil and gas exploration being one reason.
O/T
I was shocked to find that my local education board is part of 10:10. (10:10 is the group that produced the children snuff video. While my local education board has a major influence on what my children are being taught.)
I am not even in the UK.
I recommend readers check their local community education committees and schools by performing a search here
http://www.1010global.org/allcountries/education/learn
I recommend writing to your local school board if you are concerned.
richard telford says:
October 16, 2010 at 2:07 am
Yes, you can easily write a simple program to simulate lottery tickets, but that doesn’t guarantee the winning ticket will be generated, nor does that mean that your model run will hindcast all the winning tickets. On the other hand, you could ‘adjust’ the previous winning numbers as proof of the model accuracy and sell the model program for a tidy sum. The model will look genuinely accurate until someone audits the ‘winning numbers’ and finds they were tampered with.
I wonder if this will be included in the next IPPC report?
I think not.
It will be the “Great Control Knob” instead!
I can see it; The Prime Ministers and the Presidents sitting there in their offices.
Playing with the “Great Control Knob”.
Maybe they will get a special suitcase for it so they can carry it around at all times?
Nice to see someone doing real science (gather data, analysis, etc.).
Models are nice and all, but mostly they just inform our ignorance. Where the model goes off the rails is where you have something to learn.
(I ran a supercomputer center doing modeling for many years. You can use the model, but must TEST it against reality, not the other way around. We would get 1 in 10 or so ‘model runs’ that would give faulty plastic die issues (weld lines, voids). That was with ONE well characterized fluid in a precisely constrained system designed by experts for the purpose of being easy to model / likely to succeed. And a 10 hour run time.)
FWIW, at a talk about Neural Nets a guy doing DOD research on tank identification told a story about one of their “successes”. Got a 100% accurate identification of Russian vs US tanks. They started cutting the pictures down to see what part was the “key”. Gun? nope. Turret? Nope. Treads? NOPE. Surface PAINT? NOOOPE.
In desperation, they put in a picture of a tree NEAR the tanks. 100% accurate. It could even identify pictures of Russian tanks without the tank…
Seems the Neural Net had “learned” to identify high speed spy film ASA / grain vs high quality low speed low ASA low grain posed US tank photos.
Use, don’t trust, and always verify models and neural nets…
Verity, didn’t you find the same or very similar 60 year cycle in one of your postings about the GHCN data? I remember seeing a graph rather like that one up top, but I’ve forgotten what the article name was…
REPLY: and there’s the 60 year cycle Scaffeta was talking about too. See:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/10/13/scafetta-on-60-year-climate-oscillations/
-Anthony
phlogiston says:
October 16, 2010 at 4:11 am
Rabe says:
October 16, 2010 at 3:25 am
Hmmm – so if you measured say light intensity outside, and made a high order polynomial fit to it, and found an oscillation, this would show that night and day were an illusion and an artefact of naive maths?
Excellent example, do it in Boston, Mass, from 6am on the morning of December 20th until noon the next day, how long would that predict the day length for March 20th to be?
E.M.Smith says:
October 16, 2010 at 9:22 am
“In desperation, they put in a picture of a tree NEAR the tanks. 100% accurate. It could even identify pictures of Russian tanks without the tank…”
Beautiful. Sebastian Thrun, the Stanford professor behind Google’s Robot cars, once told in an interview that he was letting one of his cars test drive, and it was a new version of the software that was capable of learning itself how to classify road and surroundings.
When he gave the car a route across a bridge, the car refused to go over the bridge.
It turned out that during training the car had learned to identify the green grass on the side of the road as the marker for the environment. As the river under the bridge didn’t have the right color, the car didn’t know what to do.
Like my colleague Harry Septer we are having serious questions about the statistics published on your sea-ice page . Cryosphere today is publishing a near-record sea-ice anomaly of 1.4 million square kilometers for 2 or 3 days ago . When we are looking at the statistics about sea-ice extent published by the university of Bremen and DMI the sea ice extent of 2010 matches about the quantities of sea-ice in the years 2005 and 2006 , where after taking a careful look at the precise reporting by cryosphere today there was a lack of arctic sea ice of approx 1.000.000 square kilometers in the month of october , the lower minimums originating from late august , beginning of september .
It would be interesting to know how the computation of Cryosphere today is organised and whether certain parameters were changed during the recent years or has the satellite hardware been updated causing a lower sea-coverage ? Anyway is there an explanation or a clarification ?
richard telford says:
October 16, 2010 at 2:56 am
“Juraj V. says:
October 16, 2010 at 1:41 am
The models do not capture the AMO-like variation at all
Not so. See http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v3/n10/full/ngeo955.html
”
From the linked page: “because volcanic eruptions cannot be predicted a decade in advance, longer-term climate predictability may prove challenging,”
So, have the authors already been ostracized for unsettling the settled science? Poor chaps…
Russia may be a nutcase, politically, but their science seems to be driven by good, old fashioned, Scientific Method. I note the Russians are also the primary purveyors of the abiogenic oil theory — a theory that, I think, has gained more traction in recent years. Russian scientists certainly seem to be less inclined to tow the consensus line as their counterparts in the West.
Their work tells me that I am on the right track with my statistical analysis technique.
http://www.kidswincom.net/climate.pdf and http://www.kidswincom.net/CO2OLR.pdf. I am presently working with some of the Arctic surface stations monthly data that goes back as far as the early 1800s. I have found a 77 year cycle with one harmonic is statistically significant and common to most of the stations. The longer term cycle is probably 308 years (4×77) which I have found to be statistically significant for CO2 data. The earth tends to respond harmonically to the sun’s input.
The current arctic warming period is absolutely nothing new.
This long article by myself -with many links- examines the little known period 1815-60 when the Arctic ice melted and the Royal Society mounted an expedition to investigate the causes.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/20/historic-variation-in-arctic-ice/#more-8688
This free online book by Dr Arnd Bernaerts examines the last great warming -prior to the modern one- in great detail. It covers the period 1920 onwards..
http://www.arctic-heats-up.com/chapter_1.html
We have extensive evidence of these other warm periods (without even needing to refer to ther Vikings.) Why do we insist on believing the current episiode is unprecedented?
tonyb
Breaking the Paywall.
Thanx Serge Brin and his Google, there are few “Paywalls” in internet now.
I think, one of the working links has been already posted here…
A very nice piece of work!
Arctic Basin ice area now close to average:- http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/recent365.anom.region.1.html
The 8 Oct 10 issue of AAAS’s Science has identified the next battleground in the Left’s attempts to control the economy, the Nitrogen cycle. Work by scientists from Denmark, Cal Berkley, and Rutgers purport to show that mankind has disrupted the nitrogen cycle through overfertilization and burning fossil fuels. They state we must modify our behavior or risk causing irreversible changes to life on earth.
“The models neglect natural fluctuations because they have no means of incorporating them, and put the entire blame for climate changes since the 19th century on human activity.”
How many times have I heard climate scientists say that their models must be correct because there is no other explanation than man made influence on the climate to explain the current warming. This is one of the things that made me take a step back from my earlier beliefs on AGW. How do they explain the little ice age?
Where I’m from, there’s an old saying: “Apres mauvais temps, beau temps”. It says “after bad weather, good weather.” Now, can we say that after cold climate, warm climate? Or after warm climate, cold climate? Climate scientists don’t seem to understand how climate can change through natural variations as it has done in the past.
And this book, also, which forecasts succesfully Fish Catches all over the world:
Leonid Klyashtorin
http://alexeylyubushin.narod.ru/Climate_Changes_and_Fish_Productivity.pdf
As Edgard Cayce said: “From Russia comes the hope of the world”. Perhaps because that country has been “freezed” for 75 years, during the leftists revolution, it remained fortunately uncontaminated from people like the Greens, Club of Rome, Malthusians, Al Baby, J.”Trains” Hansen, and the like.
Alexej Buergin says: October 16, 2010 at 1:49 am
” Latimer Alder says: … Arctic Ice can only be studied by those with third hand experience,..eg in Houston, Pennsylvania and stuff. Places where it gets real cold in the winter.”
And to study sea ice you have to be as far from the sea as possible, some place like Colorado. No wonder they always get it wrong.
You fail to appreciate how thoroughly living down here or up in Colorado removes local bias.
Mike in Houston
What has really happened is that NASA and NOAA did not buy the last version of WEE for their scientists because of budget cuts.
Ah, our good friends, the Russians! Of course, they know & understand the Arctic better than anyone, because their national security depends upon it.
I was always interested about why Russia ratified the Kyoto Protocol, and it was an interesting play to amass a huge surplus of carbon credits due to the collapse of inefficient Soviet industry:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126058162650288357.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
The skullduggery in this climate change/disruption stuff is staggering!!
Bill says:
October 16, 2010 at 12:57 pm
What is more funny is that up there in the “developed” countries are buying natural “Nitre” (mined nitrates from Chile) as “organic”, to be incorporated as such in crops, at more than USD$10 per kilo. That´s good. To sell mirrors and necklaces to all those “post modern, leftist , gay oriented, and white powders aspirers´primitive individuals”
Bob of Castlemaine says at 12:44 am
Also, after our prolonged drought, rainfall in this part of the world has been above average for most of the country since around July 2009, with the last couple of months rainfall in many areas double the LTA.
Meanwhile the November issue of Natural History magazine has a two page (p. 2,3) photo by Nick Moir of the Sydney Morning Herald and some accompanying text (p.4) designed to convince the viewer/reader that Australia is doomed to be crisp as toast and curl up at the edges.
Isn’t this the AMO we are looking at?
The graph in this post looks almost identical to the one in the post last year on Barents sea 100-150m temperatures, against the AMO:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/08/new-paper-barents-sea-temperature-correlated-to-the-amo-as-much-as-4%C2%B0c/
@Phil
Rabe says:
October 16, 2010 at 5:34 am
phlogiston: …naive maths?
Umm, …yep. My experience is that most natural phenomena map either (partly) to a polynomial order of at most 3 or are cyclic (for which one would use fourier analysis) or are chaotic (for which one would better give up) or the sum of some of those.
Guess my preference on this topic. 😉
I agree a polynomial is not exactly the ideal way to look at oscillation (to say the least!). I take Phil’s point about selectivity as to the cycle start and end point. It depends on your objective – here the point is simply to demonstrate the presence of an oscillation, rather than to accurately characterise it. You need several waves in order to do that – the more the better.
nc says:
October 16, 2010 at 8:24 am
maelstrom
Russia is also building floating nuclear power plants for use in the Arctic. Oil and gas exploration being one reason.
And what could possibly go wrong?
anthony, I sent you a longish e-mail yesterday that is pertinent in this context. Murray
REPLY: Sorry, but I have not received it. Probably got spammed. Try again?
E.M.Smith says:
October 16, 2010 at 9:32 am
“Verity, didn’t you find the same or very similar 60 year cycle in one of your postings about the GHCN data? I remember seeing a graph rather like that one up top, but I’ve forgotten what the article name was…
Yes, it is a graph from a posting here. Preference would have been to use the actual figures from the book claiming fair use for education and as a review. I might have risked this on my own, er, lower profile blog, but I wasn’t sure how the publishers would see it re copyright, this being on a blog albeit a widely read one and good publicity for them. Knowing Anthony was likely to repost it (his risk then as well as mine), I decided it was safer just to link to the book figures.
phlogiston says:
October 16, 2010 at 2:53 pm
“I agree a polynomial is not exactly the ideal way to look at oscillation”
The 60 year cycle came up in Ch2 IIRC, established though wavelet transform of ice extent, the polynomial of temperature was in Ch4 on air temperature. There is weakness in individual analyses with just under 120 years of data, but when separate analyses of real data reinforce each other. Admitedly ice extent and air temperature are related, but still this is interesting.
Thanks #PapyJako says: October 16, 2010 at 1:33 am “ for the reference.
The book provides a very good overview of the parameters which may play a role for assessing the mechanism that drive the conditions in the Arctic, but, on brief review, the book is weak in regard to two aspects at least:
___The discussion of the arctic warming since winter 1918/19 during the 1930s is completely ignored. All significant papers e.g. Birkeland (1930), O.V. Johannsson (1936), R. Scherhag (1936, 1937, 1939), C.E.P. Brooks (1938); Carruthers (1941), Manley (1941), are not even mentioned, neither the paper by Schokalsky, J. (1936); ‚Recent Russian researches in the Arctic Sea and the in mountains of Central Asia’, in: The Scottish Geographical Magazine, Vol. 52, No.2, March 1936, p. 73-84. ; see Ch. 3 (b), p. 30, at: http://www.arctic-heats-up.com/chapter_3.html
___Little attention has been given to the difference between the summer and winter season, which is presumably the most interesting aspect to evaluate forcing and identify clues that generate changes. (see my earlier comment “01:37am”: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/10/16/arctic-ice-rebound%C2%A0predicted/#comment-509037
However, Ivan E. Frolov et al. are explicit with regard modelling (p.93) (excerpt):
“___There are large discrepancies in the results of simulations of climate change using coupled atmosphere-ocean models, which testifies to the uncertainties inherent in the models,
___These models are unable to simulate real historical climate changes. …… “,
which fist well to the opinion recently highlighted in the AGU news letter No 38 (21.Sept. 2010) section ‘Research Spotlights’:
___”Before a global climate model can be used by scientists to predict future climate patterns, it must first successfully predict the climate of the past as known by historical records or as inferred by proxy data…..”.
Indeed there is a reasonable amount of “real data” available since the 1910s, which allow to identify the principle source of the Arctic warming from 1919 to 1939 (Ch. 7. „Where did the early Arctic Warming originate?” at: http://www.arctic-heats-up.com/chapter_7.html ), or done in the interesting paper by “# tonyb, 10:58am”: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/20/historic-variation-in-arctic-ice/#more-8688
Fred Haynie – you are a wizard, a boffin, a bloody marvel! I don’t understand all of your statistical analyses, but have no trouble with the results. Most of your cycles match well with otherwise known cycles. 9 years- lunar cycle, 19.x years – Jupiter/Saturn synodic cycle, 60 year cycle (next cool period in 2090) – unnamed 60 year cycle treated by several contributors, most notably Scafetta, one complete tour of the sun around thew SSB, 70 years cycle – possibly some confusion of the 60 year cycle and the 90 year Gleissberg cycle, also seen in some measures of the Gleissberg cycle, 90 year cycle – the gleissberg cycle, 308-364 year cycle – maybe the Deep Grand Minimum cycle of 33 sunspot cycles (364 years), 1500 year cycle – the 1470 year D-O cycle, the “next peak in 2250” – the approximately 1000 year cycle that probably bottomed during the LIA, about 1670.
Your analysis of CO2 variability related to SST and transport from equator to polar regions, and your conclusion that recent atmospheric CO2 increase is from warming arctic SST is the only scientific analysis that I have seen. Congratulations.
Anthony, please give this work more prominence. Murray
richard telford says: “…Unforced (natural) variability in the models arises from the stochastic nature of the models. For example, I have a 600 year unforced model run that contains many cycles in model climate…”
Stochastic? You mean, based on random numbers? So this is a crap shoot? Suspicions confirmed. And you want us to spend how much, based on this Wank-O-Matic Climate Model? No thanks, Dick.
I find it rather interesting that the IPCC chooses to ignore arctic data and research from the two countries (i.e., Russia and Norway) that most likely know more about the arctic than all other countries combined. Both Norway and Russia have a vested interest in developing the most accurate understanding of the arctic and could care less about following the current politically correct line on Global Warming/Climate Change/Global Climate Disruption (or what ever they seem to be calling it today).
Definitely a 60 yr wave in the HadCRUT3 global means:
http://www.robertb.darkhorizons.org/TempGr/HADcrut3gl.JPG
Though I am skeptical about the substance of the Russian’s theory on Arctic sea ice cycles and cycles of warming and cooling in the Arctic, it is this sort of potential longer term natural cycles that keeps me 25% skeptical about AGW in general. The
Russian’s theory should have about 5 years at the maximum until it is either proven right or wrong.
Even their graph shows a general uptrend on top of the cycles, with the last few years warmer than the warming era of 1920-40. Also, I don’t recall the NW passage or the NE passage being reported as open during that earlier warming, which would make the current warming more extensive. It could be that the cyclical theory of the Arctic is correct, but that the signal of CO2 warming is also still present as a bigger forcing that the 60 year cycle is riding on top of. They would not be mutually exclusive.
In memory of the Poles. Pathetic
http://www.savethepoles.com/
Murray Duffin says:
October 16, 2010 at 3:04 pm
anthony, I sent you a longish e-mail yesterday that is pertinent in this context. Murray
REPLY: Sorry, but I have not received it. Probably got spammed. Try again?
OK I tried again. If you send your e-mail address to me I can send an attachment that would be better formatted. Murray
Fred H. Haynie says: “…The earth tends to respond harmonically to the sun’s input.”
Please “amplify,” Fred.
Jimbo says:
October 16, 2010 at 2:12 am
” “……natural hydrometeorological fluctuations whose effects on multiyear variability,…….”
This is what I pointed out yesterday in Watts’ response to Tamino here.
“It sets out the data and experience of scientists over 85 years, drawing together….”
I also pointed to examples of historic variations in sea ice going back hundreds to thousands of years here.
“From the results of spectral analyses, they conclude that there are 50-60 year cycles and less prevalent ones at 20 years,…….In the longer term the decreasing trend of ice extent may be a segment of a 200 year cyclic variation”
This is why Warmists insist on the post 1979 satellite record to make their case. The further back you go the less unusual the recent receding Arctic ice looks.”
Concluding the existence of an inexorable 60 year cycle from 85 years of experience seems to me unjustified. There has barely been one cycle to look at in the data.
You seem to neglect the fact that only in recent years has CO2 been a significant enough driver to dominate the trend in global climate. This is clear evidence of logical myopia.
Nice comment, R. Gates. There is still the rebound from the Little Ice Age, which would impose an upward trend on the cycles. Is there a CO² induced trend as well? Time will tell.
jorgekafkazar says:
October 16, 2010 at 5:48 pm
Fred H. Haynie says: “…The earth tends to respond harmonically to the sun’s input.”
Please “amplify,” Fred.
“Resonance “, google it! or open any book on physics.
They say that a dog trotting across a suspension bridge could cause it to collapse if the trot frequency was in sync or harmonic with a natural vibration of the bridge. It takes only a little push at the right time to keep a childs swing going. Push a little harder and the height of the swing increases. The annual Arctic freeze/thaw cycle is the pump that drives the ocean conveyor belt. There is a natural frequency of upwelling in the equatorial eastern Pacific. Are these upwellings responding to changes in the Arctic freeze/thaw cycle which is responding to changes in absorption of energy from the sun?
R. Gates says: October 16, 2010 at 5:08 pm
…the warming era of 1920-40. Also, I don’t recall the NW passage or the NE passage being reported as open during that earlier warming, which would make the current warming more extensive.
Due to fewer satellites in 1920-40?
Fred H. Haynie says: “They say that a dog trotting across a suspension bridge could cause it to collapse if the trot frequency was in sync or harmonic with a natural vibration of the bridge. It takes only a little push at the right time to keep a childs swing going. Push a little harder and the height of the swing increases. The annual Arctic freeze/thaw cycle is the pump that drives the ocean conveyor belt. There is a natural frequency of upwelling in the equatorial eastern Pacific. Are these upwellings responding to changes in the Arctic freeze/thaw cycle which is responding to changes in absorption of energy from the sun?”
Only, as I understand it, in your analogy the dog creates an excess strain tipping point and brings the bridge down into the river. If you assume there is no such tipping point, the dog must instead be damping the vibrations caused by other forces. Cute, if true. Or is the dog damping the vibrations from its last trip across the bridge? Or from the fleas on its back?
Why has ocean heat content been dropping in the Arctic Ocean for going on 5 years?
No. The ice will not rebound. The continuation of downwelling radiation has firmly doomed all of mankind. Give up hope. Resistance is futile.
DR says:
October 16, 2010 at 9:38 pm
Why has ocean heat content been dropping in the Arctic Ocean for going on 5 years?
Not sure what the point of this question is, or if this statement is true, but assuming it is, I will say that heat is energy, and when energy is used (in the melting of ice, although the Arctic losses cannot be solely attributed as such) it is no longer contained in the ocean.
R. Gates says: October 16, 2010 at 5:08 pm
“…the warming era of 1920-40. Also, I don’t recall the NW passage or the NE passage being reported as open during that earlier warming,”
There is a detailed history on Wikipedia (that seems to be free of a certain editor’s signature in the discussion page): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Sea_Route
“After a couple more trial runs, in 1933 and 1934, the Northern Sea Route was officially open and commercial exploitation began in 1935.”
“A special governing body Glavsevmorput’, the Administration of the Northern Sea Route, was set up in 1932 and Otto Schmidt became its first director. It supervised navigation and built Arctic ports.”
Evan says
[snip – If this is a legal copy, fine, repost and explain. If not, we cannot encourage piracy. And in case it is piracy, I cannot allow this link to remain in the interim; if it is not, I am sorry but I am sure you will understand. ~ Evan]
I have no personal interest in publishing the links. I gave them only as a help and my intent was not to break copyright rules.
Therefore, there is no point for me in launching an investigation to clarify whether the web-site that I indicated is legal or not. This website appears like something very well known, with a lot of people mentioning it in hundreds of thousand references. If they are crooks, this should be easily sorted out by the relevant authorities for any relevant legal action.
But – of course – I perfectly understand your concerns and I do not personnally feel like been censored in any way.
There is no simple way to know if it was a “legal copy” or not. If I want for example to use the “google sketchup” offered for free by “google”, should I write first to “sketchup”, the author who sells it at a very expensive price, to request a permission ?
By the way, speaking of “google” the complete book is already on “google docs” (I do not give the address…), then “google” may be a pirat, and now, everybody, in the whole world, has already a copy of the book.
I will not stand as a victim of censorship if you choose not to publish this note, or to publish only parts of it 😉
Many thanks for the work you are doing to keep the world informed.
Regards
R. Gates says: October 16, 2010 at 5:08 pm
“…the warming era of 1920-40. Also, I don’t recall the NW passage or the NE passage being reported as open during that earlier warming,”
And there is still available the photo of an american submarine at the North Pole in March during the ’30 sitting in open water. But If I were you Gatesie I would ignore it. It’s all lies, you know. /sarc off
jorgekafkazar says:
October 16, 2010 at 9:30 pm
If you are looking for a tipping point, it will not be run-a-way global warming. It will be if the Arctic freeze/thaw pump shuts down and we plunge into our next ice age. At present it appears that it is not slowing down.
tonyb says:
October 16, 2010 at 10:58 am
The current arctic warming period is absolutely nothing new.
This long article by myself -with many links- examines the little known period 1815-60 when the Arctic ice melted and the Royal Society mounted an expedition to investigate the causes.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/20/historic-variation-in-arctic-ice/#more-8688
This free online book by Dr Arnd Bernaerts examines the last great warming -prior to the modern one- in great detail. It covers the period 1920 onwards..
http://www.arctic-heats-up.com/chapter_1.html
We have extensive evidence of these other warm periods (without even needing to refer to ther Vikings.) Why do we insist on believing the current episiode is unprecedented?
tonyb
_____________________________________________________________
Tony,
Thanks for write-up and links.
I’ve bookmarked both under “Arctic Shipping” (everything I’ve found lately is in that IE folder).
Regards,
Junior
The preface of that paper is saying Many studies and international projects, such as the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA), attribute the air temperature increase during the last quarter of the 20th century exclusively to accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. However these studies typically do not account for natural hydrometeorological fluctuations whose effects on multiyear variability, as this monograph shows, can far exceed the anthropogenic impact on climate.”
But… If you double check – as a good skeptic should always do. The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA), does not talk about the cause(s) but strickly looked at the impacts (consequences) of the recent warming situation in the Arctic. If you want to know what the ACIA said about past Arctic climate it is in other documents, and they stated (talking about 20th century warming situation)”it is also possible that it is a result of variations in sea surface temperatures.
And : both positive and negative feedback processes in the Arctic, occurring over a range of timescales.
And : The average surface temperature in the Arctic increased by approximately 0.09ºC/decade during the past century, which is 50% greater than the 0.06 ºC/decade increase observed over the entire Northern Hemisphere (IPCC, 2001b). Probably as a result of natural variations, the Arctic may have been as warm in the 1930s as in the 1990s…
Knowing that, i find it hard to follow the preface if the very first statement is falsely representing what the ACIA said/wrote/published. There’s a lot more in the ACIA documents very similar to what that paper is saying (the cycles) 5 years earlier. Here’s the link to the ACIA paper (chap 2) about the Arctic Climate: Past and Present.
http://www.acia.uaf.edu/PDFs/ACIA_Science_Chapters_Final/ACIA_Ch02_Final.pdf
I have a chapter in ‘Chill’ called ‘Poles Apart’ which contrasts the Arctic and Antarctic environments and notes that they tend to trend in opposite directions. Both are regions of permament heat deficit and rely on transport of heat from ocean basins to melt the ice in summer. When researching the book, I was immediately struck by the wealth of papers on the Arctic cycles – especially the 60 year Surface Air Temperatures (SATs) which lag a pressure oscillation across the Arctic basin. Nobody knows what causes the cycle, but virtually all ‘real’ Arctic specialists know about it, as well as the long term cycles that are recorded in the ice-caps thoughout the ice-age and in the Holocene as well. The long cycles are not evenly spaced but follow a repeat pattern reminiscent of a Fibonacci series with the cycle length shortening before a new cycle begins.
What is astonishing is that government labs in the US and Britain can ignore all this work and pretend cycles do not exist (precisely because they cannot be modelled – too uneven intervals). And then more astonishing (for me) is that groups like WWW and FOE and Greenpeace ignore my friendly warnings that the ‘basic science’ is crocked – or in the light of ‘climategate’ more than slightly ‘cooked’.
I go on to consider the ocenaography of the Arctic – and document the known dynamics of heat transfer – and it was easy to predict that the ice would come back in 2008 and 2009, stall a bit in 2010 due to the ENSO event, and will resume in 2011. Indeed with all ocean basic oscillations now in negative (cool) territory, I expect 2011 to show distinct ‘global cooling’ and for this to persist for some years.
The Arctic cool phase is marked by high pressure systems where ‘normally’ there would be lows. As the cycle shifts, we need to remember that 60 years ago there were 3 billion people on the planet, not 6.5 and that the northern hemisphere grain belt is perilously vulnerable to the polar jetstream – which shifts with the Arctic oscillation. I warned that ‘energy’ will not be the immediate issue, it will be food – 67 countries currently depend upon world food aid, which is itself dependent on the northern grain surplus.
Green politics will see the whole of the UK exported wheat quota of 1 million tonnes go into one giant ethanol plant very soon in order to meet 1/10th of our legally binding EU target for transport biofuels.
Absolutely nobody has done any joined-up thinking. And despite 30 years of environmental advocacy (not quite your thing at WUWT, I know!) the ‘greens’ will not listen – not a single invite to speak to them, and they attack not my arguments, which are all backed by peer-reviewed science, but my personality (which I have to admit, does not readily pass peer-review!)
And a note to Leif from over at another thread:
The current data for the solar minimum 2006-2009 shows certain patterns in the North Atlantic (which will become more obvious after the ENSO event and its teleconnections have worked their way out) which if they were to persist over several decades rather than a few years of solar minimum, would progressively diminish the oceanic heat stores built up over the past 50 years. This is the real significance of the Dalton and Maunder type minimums. There is the long-term cycle of 1000 years (also quasi-Fibonacci in that the Greenland data shows progressive shortening of the cycle peaks: 8000, 5000, 3000, 2000, 1000 years ago in the Holocene by aboout 3 C per cycle) and this is acted upon by 60-70 Arctic Oscillations, 70-100 year Atlantic Multidecadal and 30-40 year Pacific Decadal, with ENSO 4-8 year cycle on top of that. All these cycles peaked in the 1980-2007 period.
The main conclusion of this book, and the source of their predictions, appears to be that the 60yr “cycle” in temperatures is due to a changing earth-sun distance, and hence changes in insolation. This is easy to test with the ephemerides from http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons.cgi which gives the positions of the planets at any time between 3000BC and 3000AD.
The challenge to would be skeptics is to find a 60 yr cycle in the earth-sun distance with the emphemerides. (I don’t find a spectral peak at 60yr)
And there is still available the photo of an american submarine at the North Pole in March during the ’30 sitting in open water. But If I were you Gatesie I would ignore it. It’s all lies, you know. /sarc off
Now if that would have been a ship it would really have been impressive. But you know, submarines can dive under and travel below the ice and pop up in one of the leads that always open up in winter. And that’s exactly what they did.
It was a cool feat, but doesn’t mean anything with regards to the state of the Arctic sea ice in the past.
No submarine reached the North Pole in the 30s People who don’t know that are idiots.
Verity Jones says on October 17, 2010 at 1:36 am
What is not clear from the those pages and following some of the links is whether or not they could make the journey without the need for ice breakers … Otto Schmidt is said to have used steaming icebreakers … however, the route might have been ice free for some months during that time, but it is not clear from what you have quoted.
Please look at this picture from Daily Artic Sea Ice:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/
From 10/12/09 vs comparison 10/10/10 has it stopped snowing everywhere????
Peter Taylor (October 17, 2010 at 8:26 am)
Fascinating comment – thank you.
Richard Sharpe (October 17, 2010 at 11:08 am)
There are plenty of information sources on the web. A quick search threw up this: http://www.cnrs-scrn.org/northern_mariner/vol03/tnm_3_2_1-17.pdf
It looks as if ice-strengthened ships and icebreakers were used from early days. The does not tell us very much about the conditions of the ice over the full length of the passage. As we saw this year the land fast ice holds on in certain regions such as the Lena Delta and Cape Chelyuskin and opening of a lead can be a matter of a fortunate shift of wind. When you are a commercial venture delays cost money and increase risk; although an icebreaker also costs money it allows certainty. It is likely then that reduced ice conditions in many parts of the Northern Sea Route led the Russians to believe it was viable in the early 1930s and to invest resources in it. Technological improvements (more powerful icebreakers) have continued its use, but the season does vary by year.
Fred H. Haynie says: “If you are looking for a tipping point, it will not be run-a-way global warming. It will be if the Arctic freeze/thaw pump shuts down and we plunge into our next ice age. At present it appears that it is not slowing down.”
Yes. Based on our understanding of past history, that ice age tipping point may actually exist, unlike the fictitious runaway warming scenario. If we’re entering another ice age, we may have a few more Arctic melt cycles to go before the plunge.
This short documentary studies the geological evolution that has gone on for millions of years in the High Arctic. Following the evidence of glaciers that have advanced and receded, the film also traces life forms that have changed with the climate.
http://www.nfb.ca/film/face_of_the_high_arctic/
Dalton Muir, 1958.
richard telford says:
October 17, 2010 at 9:09 am
Any information on your numerical modeling, Richard? I’d like to know how you did your “600 run”…
If you don’t have any documentation, that’s OK. Appears to be the norm (with some notable exceptions) in the climate science world…
quoting an earlier item … [i]And there is still available the photo of an american submarine at the North Pole in March during the ’30 sitting in open water. But If I were you Gatesie I would ignore it. It’s all lies, you know. /sarc off[/i]
Günther Kirschbaum says:
October 17, 2010 at 9:36 am
Now if that would have been a ship it would really have been impressive. But you know, submarines can dive under and travel below the ice and pop up in one of the leads that always open up in winter. And that’s exactly what they did.
It was a cool feat, but doesn’t mean anything with regards to the state of the Arctic sea ice in the past.
—…—…
A typo no doubt: There were no subs under the ice until the first nuclear-powered runs under the ice in the mid-50’s. Earlier submaribnes needed to surface every 12- 18 hours to survive, and could NOT go under the ice safely under any circumstances due to their cluttered topside and conning towers.
Regardless – Did you forget about the SS Manhattan supertanker that lead an ice-breaker through the Arctic ice in the early 70’s? The ice breaker was along in case of emergencies, but the tanker proved much better at clearing a lane.
Frank K. says:
October 18, 2010 at 6:35 am
I don’t do the modelling – I use the output for pseudoproxies. Some documentation is published at
Otterå, O. H., M. Bentsen, I. Bethke and N.G. Kvamstø (2009): Simulated pre-industrial climate in Bergen Climate Model (version 2): model description and large- scale circulation features, Geosci. Model Dev., 2, 197- 212, 2009.
http://www.geosci-model-dev.net/2/197/2009/gmd-2-197-2009.html
Peter Taylor says:
October 17, 2010 at 8:26 am
[i]
I have a chapter in ‘Chill’ called ‘Poles Apart’ which contrasts the Arctic and Antarctic environments and notes that they tend to trend in opposite directions. Both are regions of permament heat deficit and rely on transport of heat from ocean basins to melt the ice in summer. When researching the book, I was immediately struck by the wealth of papers on the Arctic cycles – especially the 60 year Surface Air Temperatures (SATs) which lag a pressure oscillation across the Arctic basin. Nobody knows what causes the cycle, but virtually all ‘real’ Arctic specialists know about it, as well as the long term cycles that are recorded in the ice-caps thoughout the ice-age and in the Holocene as well.
[/i]
First, a heart-felt “Thank You” for your efforts. And my hope the book continues to do well.
Second. You go on to cover several other cycles of different lengths, and of different magnitudes.
When plotted together over a 2200 year period, do the combinations of all of the known multi-year climate cycles add together in sufficient waves to create the Medieval Warm Period and Roman Warm Period?
This is interesting, but without a similar run before or after it does not tell us much.
Where did it go to? When did it do that? Which route did it take? Much better at clearing a land sounds like it had to break some ice … is that so.
Don’t get me wrong. I am looking for ironclad evidence that ice conditions were similar to those today …
Well, it’s nice and I’m sure quite believable, but didn’t they have to have some models to make future predictions?
Richard telford says:
October 18, 2010 at 2:11 pm
Frank K. says:
October 18, 2010 at 6:35 am
I don’t do the modelling – I use the output for pseudoproxies. Some documentation is published at
Otterå, O. H., M. Bentsen, I. Bethke and N.G. Kvamstø (2009): Simulated pre-industrial climate in Bergen Climate Model (version 2): model description and large- scale circulation features, Geosci. Model Dev., 2, 197- 212, 2009.
http://www.geosci-model-dev.net/2/197/2009/gmd-2-197-2009.html
—
Sorry Richard – that is NOT documentation and is almost as bad as the junk at GISS…
Why can’t these scientists actually write down the differential equations and numerical algorithms they’re attempting to solve? Is it too much to ask? Apparently so…
Peter Taylor:
In your post of October 17 you stated:
“it was easy to predict that the ice would come back in 2008 and 2009, stall a bit in 2010 due to the ENSO event, and will resume in 2011. ”
Why do you consider that the ice has “come back” at all?
The average age and volume of the ice appear to continue to decline over this period with 2010 possibly at the lowest level in the period of satellite records. When these items are included in the analysis of the state of the arctic ice it appears possible to conclude that the ice has continued to decline over this period even though the minimum ice extent is slightly higher than 2007.
http://soa.arcus.org/abstracts/trends-and-patterns-sea-ice-age-distributions-within-arctic-basin-and-their-implications-c
If you are using the arctic ice extent at the minimum as the sole data point for making the claim of a come back, then the claim does not appear to be valid. If March 31 were used as the test point it would appear the arctic had almost made a full recovery, which we know is false. If you pick the period of mid May to the end of June, then you would conclude (based on NSIDC extent figures) that 2010 was the worst showing in the satellite record for any year and if you picked the month of July, you would say it was the second worst year.
Choosing the arctic minimum ice extent as the sole measure of whether a recovery has occurred appears to be a false measure of the ice condition as the ice that survives at the minimum may consist of ever increasing percentages of relatively thin first and second year ice which is particularly vulnerable to future declines. While both volume and age are difficult to determine, that does not mean these factors should be ignored in determining if the ice has “come back”. Until there is a pick-up in the age and volume of the ice it would not appear that any recovery is underway. A full recovery would only occur if the volume, age and extent of ice older than 2 years returns to levels last seen in 2000.
NO REBOUND OF ARCTIC ICE INDICATED IN OCTOBER 2010.
As of October 25th, the arctic ice extent anomaly was at -1.412 million km2 and the temperatures are slightly above average per the Danish Meteorological Institute – Mean Temperature above 80°N with a recent sharp upward spike that has since declined, but is still above average. The Antarctic ice extent anomaly is +.376 million km2.
Info was obtained from the excellent sea ice page maintained at: http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/sea-ice-page/
WILL ARCTIC SEA ICE EXTENT BE BELOW AVERAGE FOR OCT. 31st FOR 2007 THROUGH 2009?
The average sea ice extent at October 31st for the years 2002 through 2006 was fairly steady and averaged 8,768,875 km2. Since then, the values have bounced around with the 2007 through 2009 average at 8,402,396 km2
Per IJIS the arctic sea ice extent value is: 7,635,156 km2 (October 25, 2010).
Predicting sea ice extent, even 6 days out, is hazardous as the last 10 days have shown an average daily increase of approximately 75,000 km2 daily while the last three years have shown an average daily increase for the period October 25th through 31st period of approximately 125,000 km2.
At this point, October 2010 looks as if it will be between the record minimum in 2007 and the second lowest minimum recorded in 2009, but we will have to wait to see what happens. This would put it slightly below the 2007 to 2009 average.
No rebound in arctic ice is indicated by these numbers, but maybe next month will see a faster increase in the spread of first year ice.
A sudden increase in first year ice will not be an indication of recovery if the ice does not make it through the 2011 melt season and additional perennial ice is transported out of the arctic through the Fram and Nares straits.
The rate of sea ice extent increase may have slowed recently due to transport through the straits and the quality of arctic ice continues to decline as thin first year ice is replacing perennial ice, which tends to be thicker than first year ice. An animation showing the ice transport through the Fram and Nares straits that continuously is updated can be seen by clicking the play button at:
http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2010/09/open-thread-1.html?cid=6a0133f03a1e37970b0134881af0ac970c
Based on data provided by IJIS the October 31 sea ice extent for 2002 through 2009 was:
October 31 Sea Ice Extent km2
2002 8,799,844
2003 8,729,375 10-28- value 10-31 not asvailable
2004 8,735,156
2005 8,880,000
2006 8,700,000
2007 8,003,281
2008 8,892,344
2009 8,311,563
Average
8,768,875 2002 to 2006
8,402,396 2007 to 2009
Data was accessed using the “Data Download” button at:
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
REPLY: heh, uber spin this: “Mean Temperature above 80°N with a recent sharp upward spike that has since declined, but is still above average.” yet still at 256 kelvin or -17.15 degrees Celsius. This happens every year…no news. – Anthony
Anthony:
Thank you for taking the time from your busy schedule to read the post above. Sorry for distracting you with the temperature information in a post about ice extent.
As more ice is exported through the Fram and Nares straits (see animation at link in previous post), the sea ice extent growth has slowed. Per IJIS there was 7,719,531 at October 27th. At this pace, October 31 could represent a record low for that date.
NO REBOUND FOR ARCTIC ICE THAT IS AT LEAST FIVE YEARS OLD
Per the NSIDC:
“Last winter, the wind patterns associated with the negative phase of the Arctic Oscillation transported a great deal of multiyear ice from the coast of the Canadian Arctic into the Beaufort and Chukchi seas. Scientists speculated that much of this ice, some five years or older, would survive the summer melt period. Instead, it mostly melted away. At the end of the summer 2010, under 15% of the ice remaining the Arctic was more than two years old, compared to 50 to 60% during the 1980s. There is virtually none of the oldest (at least five years old) ice remaining in the Arctic (less than 60,000 square kilometers [23,000 square miles] compared to 2 million square kilometers [722,000 square miles] during the 1980s).
Whether younger multiyear ice (two or three years old) in the Arctic Ocean will continue to age and thicken depends on two things: first, how much of that ice stays in the Arctic instead of exiting into the North Atlantic through Fram Strait; and second, whether the ice survives its transit across the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas or instead melts away.”
SEE VIDEO AT:
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/
See visual representations of ice age at:
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/
So far in 2010, there have been no days in the IJIS records that show a recovery of 500,000 km2 (April 7th came close) compared to the same day in 2009 October 27 is below the 2009 level.
The 500,000 km2 recovery prediction made below did not occur as the September 2010 average of 4.9 million km2 calculated by NSIDC was 460,000 km2 below the 2009 amount of 5.36 million km2. http://nsidc.org/news/press/20091005_minimumpr.html
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/09/prediction-arctic-ice-will-continue-to-recover-this-summer/
2011 PREDICTION
THE NSIDC MINIMUM SEPTEMBER AVERAGE IN 2011 WILL BE BELOW THE MINIMUM RECORD SET IN 2005.
No rebound currently, but that is not what the post was saying. You are stating information that is readily available to all and of which we are aware. Try reading the book – it too issues a prediction.
“it is predicted that in the 21st century, oscillatory (rather than unidirectional) ice extent changes in the Arctic seas will continue. During the 2020s-2040s, an increase in sea ice extent is projected, with the maximum around 2030 in the eastern seas and around 2035 in the western seas.”
Figure 6.1 The predition references three peer reviewed papers. These may be in Russian but there is no less rigour in Russian journals than in English ones and now that we know about the closed shop revealed by Climategate, indeed there may be more.
So you might be right in your prediction for Sept 2011, but let’s see what the next 10 years bring. And shouting will not change what will happen either way.
Verity Jones:
Thank you for your respone, and I apologize for using capital letters (at least they were not in bold.)
I have no issue with the source of the book being Russian and I am not challenging the accuracy of the data being employed. It iis the representations of the scope of the conclusions of the book and the authors’ certainty with respect to the conclusions as presented in the original post that are generating my skepticism that this single source of information proves that a rebound will occur. While you state “Man is not the primary cause of change in the Arctic” this statement does not prove that humans are not having an impact that is causing Arctic ice to decline at a faster rate than it otherwise would or that changes in the future will not be driven to an increasing extent by additional CO2 forcing as humans cause CO2 levels to rise.
Some of the data you cited in the original post and the book appear to support the possibility of long-term CO2 warming.
Figure 4.1 and6.1 appear to be temperature anomaly charts and not an ice extent chart. The charts appear to support the existence of an additional warming trend in this area of the arctic that is operating in conjunction with the identified cycles as the 1970 low is higher than the 1910 low and the 2000 high is higher than the 1940 high. Even if the 50-60 year cycle is valid, these observations appear to support the existence of an additional factor which is causing an upward shift in the temperature cycle that could be a signature of CO2 warming. The extension of the line beyond 2000 in the figures does not appear to be supported by the trends for the previous period as the 2030 minimum anamoly is below the 1970 anamoly when it would appear that it should be above 1970 since 1970 and 2000 were above their respective prior points. The figure also shows the 2060 peak as being below the 2000 peak.
Why was the line for the future periods drawn in this fashion, is it based on a model prediction – if we can not trust models, why should we trust this forecast?
In the chart provided in the post from digging in clay above there is a data set going back to 1880. The data in the period 1880 to 1910 does not appear to show any trend. Was this data included in the analysis performed in the book? What is the cycle represented by the 30 year period of 1880 to 1910? Do each of the data sets in the digging with clay temperature anamoly chart separately follow the 50-60 year cycle or is it only the average of these data sets that follows the 50-60 year cycle trend?
The temperture anamoly cited in the original post is only being measured for latitude 70 to 85 degrees north. Does the observed temperature anamoly for latitude 60 to 70 degrees north show the same cycle?
The book appears to be analyzing the Russian shelf areas of the Arctic. The analysis in the book did not include data from the the period of 2004 through 2009 in determing the existence of the cycle. Does the analysis still hold if all areas of the arctic are included and the period 2004 to today is included? Another source that has read the book noted these weaknesses when it stated:
“I read through this book earlier this year, so I’m familiar with it. As the title (“Climate Change in the Eurasian Arctic Shelf Seas”) states, the book analyzes data only the Russian shelf regions of the Arctic – it doesn’t include the central Arctic or U.S./Canadian Arctic, where a significant portion of the decline has occurred over the past decades. Their conclusions are drawn from data through only 2003, so with the recent low years since then, the observed patterns of variability may no longer hold. (There is a final section in the book on 2003-2008 sea ice conditions, but these data are discussed independently and are not incorporated to update their analyses earlier in the book.)
The book only superficially examines ice thickness changes (again only in the Russian shelf regions) and does not examine the recent thickness data from ICESat or the ice age fields. Finally, as it states in conclusion #2: “These cyclic oscillations of sea ice extent were superimposed on the background consisting of a negative long-term linear trend that characterizes gradual decrease of sea ice extent during the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century.” In other words, even in the Russian data, there is a decline. The authors suggest this decline could be indicative of a longer cycle, but admit that such a conclusion can only be “conjectured”.
So while the book provides useful data (Russian information is often difficult to obtain), their conclusions about reasons for the changes in overall Arctic sea ice and the state of sea ice in the coming decades are more limited than the book seems to suggest. Andy Mahoney (a former colleague of mine at NSIDC) and others also analyzed the Russian data in a paper published in 2008 (Mahoney et al., 2008 – a brief summary is here).”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/10/21/summer-2010-in-the-arctic-and-other-sea-ice-topics/
The analysis of the sea ice extent data for the Russian shelf area using data from Russian sources noted that:
“We have acquired digitized historical ice charts of the Eurasian Arctic from the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) in St. Petersburg, Russia for the periods 1933 to 1992 and 1997 to 2006. We also have ice index data for the periods 1924 to 1933 and 1993 to 1996, creating an observational ice record that spans more than 80 years. From ice chart data, we have located the ice edge where possible in every chart and calculated seasonal ice extent anomalies for the marginal seas of the eastern Arctic. These results indicate that although there was also a retreat in autumn (annual minimum) sea ice extent in the early part of the 20th century, there was no apparent retreat in springtime (annual maximum). In recent years however, there has been a year-round retreat of eastern Arctic sea ice extent.”
Even the original post creates some doubt as to the length of the cycle when it states:
“From the results of spectral analyses, they conclude that there are 50-60 year cycles and less prevalent ones at 20 years, 8-12 years and 2-3 years. These are closely related to variations in general atmospheric circulation. In the longer term the decreasing trend of ice extent may be a segment of a 200 year cyclic variation responsible for the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age.”
How do we know that the current period is not a part of a 200 year cycle of long term arctic ice decline?
I was also surprised by the reference to total solar irradience (TSI) as it appears that the arctic ice decline accelerated after 2000 even though TSI was declining http://icecap.us/images/uploads/ARCTIC12.jpg , thus the two do not show a close correlation for this period. This would indicate that forces other than TSI, such as CO2 forcing, may be contributing to changes in arctic ice extent and temperature.
Also, if “During the 2020s-2040s, an increase in sea ice extent is projected” why isn’t the date of the maximum extent 2040 instead “the maximum around 2030 in the eastern seas and around 2035 in the western seas”, what happens to the increase from 2035 to 2040?
The representation of the book by climate scientist Dr. Walt Meir and the Russian ice extent data appear to differ significantly from the post you left. Perhaps you are correct that I will need to get a copy and read through it.
“Some of the data you cited in the original post and the book appear to support the possibility of long-term CO2 warming.”
Yes, since we are still warming out of the little ice age that is what I would expect regardless of CO2 concentration.
“In the chart provided in the post from digging in clay above there is a data set going back to 1880. The data in the period 1880 to 1910 does not appear to show any trend. Was this data included in the analysis performed in the book? What is the cycle represented by the 30 year period of 1880 to 1910? Do each of the data sets in the digging with clay temperature anamoly chart separately follow the 50-60 year cycle or is it only the average of these data sets that follows the 50-60 year cycle trend?” The graph came from another posting http://diggingintheclay.wordpress.com/2010/09/01/in-search-of-cooling-trends/ (which was also featured on WUWT). No the analyses was not from the book. Yes each of the temperature sets roughly follow the pattern what is striking is how well they follow the pattern when you put them together. The pattern from 1880-1910 is cooling, but with some particularly cold excursions. This is one station. Such cold excursions are common even in warmer periods; if you look at nearby stations – Andenes, Alta Lufthavn, Gjesver, the same extreme excursions are there but the cooling down to 1910 is clearer.
“The temperture anamoly cited in the original post is only being measured for latitude 70 to 85 degrees north. Does the observed temperature anamoly for latitude 60 to 70 degrees north show the same cycle?”
You can find the same pattern at all lattitudes (again see – http://diggingintheclay.wordpress.com/2010/09/01/in-search-of-cooling-trends/) Not all stations show this pattern – an obvious reason would be an effect of city growth and urban warming, that could be a cause of deviation from the pattern.
Dr Meier’s opinions on the book are quite welcome and seem reasonable. I wish I had been able to comment on his post at the time. I find it interesting that the Russian’s conclusions are at odds with his own. Thank goodness scientists have the freedom to view data differently and reach alternate conclusions. I’d hate to live in a world where no-one came up with new ideas or analysis and it has been quite fun to see scientific orthodoxy turned on its head at times (one that comes to mind is the bacteria that are now an accepted cause of stomach ulcers and curable).
Dr Arnd Bernaerts, who has studied information available about the 1919-1939 Arctic warming, has written some interesting comments about the recent Arctic Report Card Update http://diggingintheclay.wordpress.com/2010/10/27/noaa-%E2%80%9Carctic-report-card-update-for-2010%E2%80%9D/ and aslo Tony Brown has previously written about the little known period 1815-60 when the Arctic ice melted and the Royal Society mounted an expedition to investigate the causes. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/20/historic-variation-in-arctic-ice/#more-8688
The current warmth in the Arctic may have reduced the ice to an extreme low, and I can understand the reasons why some very high profile scientists are saying that it will not recover, I just don’t accept the magnitude of climate sensitivity to CO2, therefore I believe the drivers of change to lie elsewhere with a more significant hope of recovery.
Verity Jones:
Thank you for taking the time to respond to the questions I left.
I appreciate you clearing up that the chart provided above was not from the book.
The NOAA Arctic Report Card appears to support my position that a recovery of arctic ice is not likely to occur. I will spend some time going through Arnd Bernaerts post and may leave a comment there. Hopefully this post relies on peer reviewed studies to support its comments, and I will also look at the historical reference post. Thank you for the references.
The book does not appear to have used the pre-1900 data you mention, and the station you selected does not appear to show cooling. The book used a 103 year period in a geographicly limited area to establish the existence of a 50-60 year cycle which it then projects 30-40 years into the future without identifying the specific forces that generate the cycle. Accepting that “model projections of future ice area fluctuations are unreliable” does not generate any confidence that we should rely on the rebound prediction of the model being suggested by this book.
In the chart you provided, there only appears to be one cooling period. You are assuming that this cooling was caused by non-human induced changes. This assumption may not be correct. What you have claimed to be a natural cycle may only be the general background of CO2 forced warming offset by cooling from aerosols or some other factor in the 1940 to 1970 period. Murray Mitchell, in the NOAA Weather Bureau’s Office of Climatology, collected a set of data over a fraction of the Northern Hemisphere—from 20 to 90 degrees North latitude. and found that Earth experienced a period of cooling (by about 0.3°C) from 1940 through 1970. Some studies indicated that the cooling during this period was caused by sulphate aerosols while a recent study looked at changes in sea surface temperatures.
Thompson, D., Wallace, J., Kennedy, J., & Jones, P. (2010). An abrupt drop in Northern Hemisphere sea surface temperature around 1970 Nature, 467 (7314), 444-447 DOI: 10.1038/nature09394
“The twentieth-century trend in global-mean surface temperature was not monotonic: temperatures rose from the start of the century to the 1940s, fell slightly during the middle part of the century, and rose rapidly from the mid-1970s onwards1. The warming–cooling–warming pattern of twentieth-century temperatures is typically interpreted as the superposition of long-term warming due to increasing greenhouse gases and either cooling due to a mid-twentieth century increase of sulphate aerosols in the troposphere2, 3, 4, or changes in the climate of the world’s oceans that evolve over decades (oscillatory multidecadal variability)2, 5. Loadings of sulphate aerosol in the troposphere are thought to have had a particularly important role in the differences in temperature trends between the Northern and Southern hemispheres during the decades following the Second World War2, 3, 4. Here we show that the hemispheric differences in temperature trends in the middle of the twentieth century stem largely from a rapid drop in Northern Hemisphere sea surface temperatures of about 0.3 °C between about 1968 and 1972. The timescale of the drop is shorter than that associated with either tropospheric aerosol loadings or previous characterizations of oscillatory multidecadal variability. The drop is evident in all available historical sea surface temperature data sets, is not traceable to changes in the attendant metadata, and is not linked to any known biases in surface temperature measurements. The drop is not concentrated in any discrete region of the Northern Hemisphere oceans, but its amplitude is largest over the northern North Atlantic.”
The drop in mid-century temperatures as Anthony would say is “old news”. http://www.globalchangeblog.com/2010/09/rethinking-the-mechanisms-of-20th-century-climate-warming/
That the Russian data can find the same signature in their area of the arctic is therefore not surprising. What is needed to support the position that Arctic ice will rebound is the identifcation of a forcing mechanism that will overide the known radiative forcing from CO2 and loss of albedo from the current ice retreat.
The most that it appears that I can get out of this book is that the authors have done an excellent job of data collection. Based on the additional information you have provided, I accept that the data in the book and the chart you have posted above are accurate.
Your post does not indicate that the book provided any explanation of the pattern based on radiative forcing or an explanation of how a change in current radiative forcing will occur in the future which will create a rebound in arctic sea ice extent. While I appreciate your efforts in providing the information of the existence of this database there is still a missing piece to your analysis. All you have proved is that the eurasian shelf shows a similar temperature pattern to the rest of the Northern Hemisphere over the last century. Show me the radiative forcing that will cause the temperature to decline and the ice to rebound and I will support your position.
“The basic concept of radiative forcing is one on which scientists — whatever their views on global warming or the IPCC — all seem to agree. Disagreements come into play in determining the actual value of that number.”
http://www.physorg.com/news187443399.html
I do not dispute that the recent decline in Arctic ice is more complex than saying it has occurred because of CO2 increases. There are clearly affects which have amplified CO2 radiative forcing. http://www.skepticalscience.com/What-causes-Arctic-amplification.html
A possible place to start in building a case for Arctic ice rebound would be to focus on a change in the Arctic Oscillation. http://nsidc.org/arcticmet/patterns/arctic_oscillation.html
The Arctic Oscillation was clearly a factor in the 2002 decline:
“Serreze believes that the September 2002 low-ice mark was reached due to unusually warm temperatures and frequent storms that worked in tandem to break up and melt the ice. The Arctic oscillation was in a positive phase the previous winter and appears to have played a role. But the Arctic Oscillation doesn’t explain everything, and there are signs that it may be moving back to a more neutral phase. Whether this will be just a temporary shift is not known. Yet the ice continues to retreat.
“The more recent years have shown indications of a recovery in the Arctic Oscillation towards more neutral conditions, but we’ve still seen decay in sea ice,” Serreze says. He wonders if the ice has thinned to a point where it has reached a threshold; a situation where thin ice and warming waters reinforce each other, regardless of pressure patterns like the Arctic Oscillation.”
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/ArcticIce/arctic_ice2.php
The problem for the arctic ice, as the study below suggests, is “that strong positive ice–temperature feedbacks have emerged in the Arctic, increasing the chances of further rapid warming and sea ice loss”. Citing periods of prior ice loss and recovery are not relevant if the forces affecting the ice have changed. The net increase in radiative forcing from CO2 since 1850 would make any example of ice recovery from a previous low suspect as a predictor of future conditions, but I will check out the 1815-1860 information (Does this information refute that the Little Ice Age lasted until 1850?) to see if there are any examples of forcings that would support a future ice recovery.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v464/n7293/full/nature09051.html
@Will Crump
you have too much time on your hands if you write such long comments; you should start your own blog.
So sulphate cooling? Well the abstract of the Thompson et al 2010 paper is misleading, because they admit:
and when we visualise the mid-century cooling it does seem rather global:
(description here)
Arctic ice loss from the poles can explained by transport of warmed water into the region, without invoking effects of CO2. It then has the effect of increasing the concentration of a more potent greenhouse gas – water vapour. From the last paper you linked to:
This results in an increase in cloudiness in the summer which would mitigate increased solar ocean warming; reduced sea ice cover at other times increases warming but also increased loss of thermal energy to space. Thus over a period of years we have mechanism to support ice recovery as the rest of the planet starts to cool also.
It is often said that due to the lack of humidity, CO2 should have greatest effect at high latitudes which are low in humidity. The paper measures up to 10% increase in humidity (June-Oct) in the decade studied, so I rather think H20 would trump CO2 in this case.
Verity Jones writes,
“@Will Crump
you have too much time on your hands if you write such long comments; you should start your own blog. ”
That remark deflects some thoughtful points and questions. For example, what physical mechanism drives these 60-year cycles?
@Gneiss
Deflects? I should have used a smiley – actually I meant to be complementary as well as alluding that he has more time than me and is very good at pulling out information he wishes to present. As such it seems many of his questions can be viewed as rhetorical. I certainly took them that way.
As for the mechanism driving the 60 year cycles – well if we knew that…
@Peter Taylor
Thanks for the more comprehensive answer. I answered with the resourses to hand, and I am only too aware of starting to scratch the surface of a vast literature on the area (Arctic).
Once again the sulphate cooling story emerges – does anybody bother to check a few facts: 1) anthropogenic sulphur was released at low altitudes, and in order to cool the planet, only those volcanic eruptions that penetrate to very high atltitudes are effective; 2) the various clean-air acts and sulphur reduction programmes of the EU and US, along with the collapse of the Russian and Eastern European economies were counterbalanced by other sources in industrialising countries, so globally, suplphur emissions did not reduce significantly, 3) the EU reductions kicked-in AFTER the data showed the end of global dimming, 4) global dimming AND subsequent brightening was a pattern seen in unpolluted areas of the southern hemisphere, 5) the brightening was measured as a flux of visible (warming) light to the surface – 70% of which is ocean, and this flux and subsequent heat transfer to land, is greater by a factor of 4 than the computed radiative forcing from CO2 (which is a computed figure relying upon models which are not entirely transparent – I suggest trying to read IPCC’s monograph on the concept!).
The point is that the IPCC suite of models ALL used a flawed set of assumptions relating to the 1945-1975 trough and produced a ‘fit’ (hindcasting) that convinced them the models were reliable. The Thompson et al paper is the first of the ‘backtrackers’ – and I am suspicious of the ‘teamwork’ that focuses on the ocean dip and pleads ignorance of the mechanisms, when equally they could be drawing attention to the use of flawed assumptions in the models!
The ‘dip’ from 1945 to 1975 changes shape the further north you go – in the Arctic you get a double ‘hump’ with 1940 showing a peak, and the second peak occurs 60-70 years later and varies at different points in the Arctic. We don’t know much about previous peaks and troughs, and the LIA period may have had a different pattern anyway. The crucial point is that whatever creates the trough is powerful enough to over-ride any CO2 forcing. Likewise, whatever drives the peaks can amplify that signal. It seems clear to me that the real CO2 signal is much smaller than computed.
The ONLY way to drive a global temperature signal in sea surface temperature (then transferred to land) when there is only slight long-term variability/trend in the solar TSI, is to alter cloud cover or atmospheric transparency (and this is the findings of the teams that showed the trough was a worldwide natural phenomenon). You can create significant changes in regional and I would say also global temperature by altering the SPATIAL distribution of cloud cover as well as or even without any percentage change in overall cover. This is because ‘global warming’ is not global – it is concentrated in the top 200m of the northern ocean gyres from whence it is transferred by westerly air currents to the land masses.
Arctic cloud cover increased by 14% from 1980 to 2000 (NOAA’s State of the Arctic Report has the data). Likewise we know that more warm water entered the Arctic basin from further south, ultimately drawn in by pressure changes and the shifting Beaufort gyre. The Arctic Oscillation – however longterm a phenomenon, may be linked to solar cycles or it may be a stochastic resonance phenomenon – but the pressure oscillation (followed by temperature changes) is real enough. What is not real are the general circulation models and radiative forcing calculations that now need revision.
We will see more of the truth over the next few years. We need to monitor the export of heat from further south – via ocean currents and cloud, and this already looks to be depriving the Arctic of heat (the Arctic, is, of course, a region of permanent heat-loss). IF the surface air temperatures continue on a high, and IF the ice loss continues, despite the cooler temperatures of the waters flowing into the Arctic, then I will certainly abandon my critique and accept that CO2 is the main candidate driving this recent peak.
Verity:
The questions were not rhetorical and I appreciate you answering the ones you did. Please respond to the items you left unanswered.
Peter Taylor:
Thanks for the info, I will check through the peer reviewed studies to see how many actually identify an influence from aerosols or other sources for the 1940 to 1970 cooling. I do not contend this was the only factor. If you have time, please provide some links to studies that support the very interesting information you posted.
I accept the criticism of the models used by the IPCC as the forecasts substantially understated the potential for arctic sea ice loss. These models are attempting to forecast complex processes that are not well understood. I doubt the creators of these models think they are perfect. Rather, the models appear to be a work in process that are constantly being altered and improved.
I also accept the position that factors other than warming from human additions of CO2 to the atmosphere are causing changes in the arctic. What I do not see is that the Russian study forms a sufficient basis to say that a rebound will occur.
Verity:
The very information you provide casts doubt on the stability of the 60 year cycle since the period of the LIA and MWP were not 60 year cycles. Relying on the relative short period and geographic limitations from the Russian data to forecast a future rebound does not appear supportable given other information which suggests the cycle is not stable. You do not appear to be applying the same level of skeptical challenge to the Russian conclusions as you have to other data that conflicts with your bias.
The 1940 to 1970 period of cooling appears to be the subject of multiple explanations, and given the complexity of climate, I would not expect the answer to be so simple as saying that any one single item such as human induced changes from sulphate levels were the only driving factor. There also appear to be additions due to volcanic activity and perhaps TSI reductions. While the information provided by the author of the link below is subject to some rather sharp analysis at this blog, at least he is proposing possible sources for the changes observed in this period.
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2010/08/23/antrhopogenic-global-cooling/
I can understand disagreeing with the certainty levels that Tamino attaches to the various forces listed and I concede there may be other factors at work that he has not identified. The point is that the global cooling of 1940 to 1970 did not happen by magic. The cooling occurred due to changes in the physical forces being applied to the climate system.
If you want to assert that arctic ice will rebound, show me the forces that will cause the rebound and why these forces are going to be able to override the increase in radiative forcing by CO2 and warming due to loss of albedo due to diminished ice cover. If you are going to rely on diminished heat inflow from ocean currents, then explain why this will occur as TSI increases from its current low point. There may be some loss on the Pacific side as the Pacific switches from el nino to la nina in 2011, but this would not appear to be a sustained change as it is likely that el nino will return. These two forces appear to be a net zero at best and may be a net positive forcing as el nino patterns are shifting and becoming more intense
Perhaps you can identify some long term change in the Atlantic ocean currents, which appear to provide most of the heat inflow from ocean currents to the arctic, due to a shift in thermohaline circulation.
Lets stick with identifying the physical forces for the rebound rather than just wishing it will occur.
Peter Taylor:
Are you suggesting aerosols have no climate impact or only that they may not be the sole source that had an impact on the temperature change from 1940 to 1970.
The focus of my commentary should be the reliability of the prediction in the article left by Verity Jones of an arctic ice rebound based on the cited book and the historical data cited in the book. I am not refuting the data, only the conclusions drawn from the data. I apoligize to the extent I have gone off topic.
There are many forces affecting the current decline in Arctic ice.
When these individual forces are scrutinized and compared to historical levels, the book prediction of a rebound appears unreliable. The book did not identify the physical forces that are generating the observed 60 year cycle, and therefore does not offer much on which to base a rebound prediction.
Regardless of the impact of aerosols on the data collected in the book, changes in aerosols since 1970 appear to be having a net warming effect on the Arctic (according to peer reviewed studies).
Decreasing concentrations of sulphate aerosols and increasing concentrations of black carbon have substantially contributed to rapid Arctic warming during the past three decades. These are additional sources of arctic warming that will have to be overcome or changed before the Arctic ice extent can rebound, as predicted in the article above, can occur.
NASA GISS suggests aerosols play a large role in Arctic warming
This information was noted by Anthony Watts at:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/09/nasa-giss-suggests-aerosols-play-a-large-role-in-arctic-warming/
The above posting and many of the comments about the study were generally positive, particularly by those seeking to deny any impact for CO2 induced warming.
There does appear to be some uncertainty in the role of aerosols as another article includes the following when reporting about the study:
“This is an important model study, raising lots of great questions that will need to be investigated with field research,” said Loretta Mickley, an atmospheric chemist from Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. who was not directly involved in the research. Understanding how aerosols behave in the atmosphere is still very much a work-in-progress, she noted, and every model needs to be compared rigorously to real life observations. But the science behind Shindell’s results should be taken seriously. [Info on this Drew Shindell is at http://www.giss.nasa.gov/staff/dshindell/ which includes references to other peer reviewed papers by Drew Shindell]
“It appears that aerosols have quite a powerful effect on climate, but there’s still a lot more that we need to sort out,” said Shindell.
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/warming_aerosols_prt.htm
Another source reporting on the study, which appears to rely on a model, states:
“A new study, led by climate scientist Drew Shindell of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, used a coupled ocean-atmosphere model to investigate how sensitive different regional climates are to changes in levels of carbon dioxide, ozone, and aerosols.
The researchers found that the mid and high latitudes are especially responsive to changes in the level of aerosols. Indeed, the model suggests aerosols likely account for 45 percent or more of the warming that has occurred in the Arctic during the last three decades. The results were published in the April issue of Nature Geoscience.”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090408164413.htm
The peer reviewed study is at:
Drew Shindell, Greg Faluvegi. Climate response to regional radiative forcing during the twentieth century. Nature Geoscience, 2009; 2 (4): 294 DOI: 10.1038/ngeo473
Abstract:
“Regional climate change can arise from three different effects: regional changes to the amount of radiative heating that reaches the Earth’s surface, an inhomogeneous response to globally uniform changes in radiative heating and variability without a specific forcing. The relative importance of these effects is not clear, particularly because neither the response to regional forcings nor the regional forcings themselves are well known for the twentieth century. Here we investigate the sensitivity of regional climate to changes in carbon dioxide, black carbon aerosols, sulphate aerosols and ozone in the tropics, mid-latitudes and polar regions, using a coupled ocean–atmosphere model. We find that mid- and high-latitude climate is quite sensitive to the location of the forcing. Using these relationships between forcing and response along with observations of twentieth century climate change, we reconstruct radiative forcing from aerosols in space and time. Our reconstructions broadly agree with historical emissions estimates, and can explain the differences between observed changes in Arctic temperatures and expectations from non-aerosol forcings plus unforced variability. We conclude that decreasing concentrations of sulphate aerosols and increasing concentrations of black carbon have substantially contributed to rapid Arctic warming during the past three decades.”
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v2/n4/full/ngeo473.html
A later study by the same Dr. Drew Shindell was also cited favorably on this blog
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/31/an-idea-i-can-get-behind-regulate-methane-first/
indicates that:
“Certain gases that cause warming are so closely linked with the production of aerosols that the emissions of one type of pollutant can indirectly affect the quantity of the other. And for two key gases that cause warming, these so-called “gas-aerosol interactions” can amplify their impact.
“We’ve known for years that methane and carbon monoxide have a warming effect,” said Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York and lead author of a study published this week in Science. “But our new findings suggest these gases have a significantly more powerful warming impact than previously thought.”
http://www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2009/10/091030100020.htm
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center (2009, October 31). Interactions With Aerosols Boost Warming Potential Of Some Gases.
Please provide peer reviewed studies which come to a conclusion that the trend with respect to current aerosol levels will lead to a decline in Arctic temperature.
The article below may be a good start, but the article did not connect the observed “visibility” change in the atmosphere to changes in temperature levels. The global dimming observed may be reducing the warming impact from other sources, but does not appear to have helped the Arctic ice extent. Making the air in the U.S. as polluted as it is in China does not represent a sound policy for assisting a rebound of Arctic ice.
Kaicun Wang. Robert E. Dickinson, Shunlin Liang. Clear Sky Visibility Has Decreased over Land Globally from 1973 to 2007. Science, March 13, 2009
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090312140850.htm
I am also looking at the possible impact of increasing cloudiness in the arctic as being a source of a rebound, but so far, the clouds appear to generate more warming since they do not have a significant impact on albedo compared to summer ice and in winter the clouds have a significant warming affect:
Abstract:
“The simulation of Arctic cloud cover and the sensitivity of Arctic climate to cloud changes are investigated using an atmosphere–mixed-layer ocean GCM (GENESIS2). The model is run with and without changes in three-dimensional cloud fraction under 2 × CO2 radiative forcing. This model was chosen in part because of its relatively successful representation of modern Arctic cloud cover, a trait attributable to the parameterized treatment of mixed-phase microphysics. Simulated modern Arctic cloud fraction is insensitive to model biases in surface boundary conditions (SSTs and sea ice distribution), but the modeled Arctic climate is sensitive to high-frequency cloud variability. When forced with increased CO2 the model generally simulates more (less) vertically integrated cloudiness in high (low) latitudes. In the simulation without cloud feedbacks, cloud fraction is fixed at its modern control value at all grid points and all levels while CO2 is doubled. Compared with this fixed-cloud experiment, the simulated cloud changes enhance greenhouse warming at all latitudes, accounting for one-third of the global warming signal. This positive feedback is most pronounced in the Arctic, where approximately 40% of the warming is due to cloud changes. The strong cloud feedback in the Arctic is caused not only by local processes but also by cloud changes in lower latitudes, where positive top-of-the-atmosphere cloud radiative forcing anomalies are larger. The extra radiative energy gained in lower latitudes is transported dynamically to the Arctic via moist static energy flux convergence. The results presented here demonstrate the importance of remote impacts from low and midlatitudes for Arctic climate change.”
The Impact of Cloud Feedbacks on Arctic Climate under Greenhouse Forcing by
Steve Vavrus
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0442(2004)017%3C0603%3ATIOCFO%3E2.0.CO%3B2
Will Crump:
You asked about the work on the cooling period. It does, of course, correspond with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, as many have pointed out – and although that is an alternation of sea level pressure states, as is the Arctic Oscillation, and temperature changes follow, these temperature changes can only really be due to differential cloud cover and/or natural aerosols affecting insolation at the sea or land surface.
I was alerted to the nature of the global cooling trough by three key papers in 2005 Science:
Pinker R.T., B. Zhang and E.G. Dutton (2005) Do satellites detect trends in surface solar radiation? Science 308 p850-854
Wielicki B.A. et al., (2005) Changes in earth’s albedo measured by satellite Science 308 , 825
Wild M. et al., (2005) From dimming to brightening: decadal changes in solar radiation at the Earth’s surface Science 308, 847-850
These papers convinced me that the IPCC models using anthropogenic aerosols as explanation for the global trough were wrong. That sulphate pollution was too localised and the pattern was prevalent in unpolluted zones. If you hunt through the IPCC working group reports, you will find they have agreed that in 2007, but they don’t say what it means for the model hindcasts! (I don’t have the reference for that page – sorry, I must look it up!).
It is clear from these papers that cloud cover and a more transparent atmosphere were the causes of the shift from dimming to brightening in the early 1980s, but prior to that there were no globalised surface radiation budget data and so one must assume the transition from 1940 to cooling was also a shift in cloud and atmospheric transparency.
On the wider Arctic dynamic – I have a chapter in ‘Chill’ which gives an extensive bibliography – I find the oceanography gets little press, and there is much from papers that report nothing unusual on ice-mass, surface melting and surface temperatures as of now compared to 1930s and 1940s in Greenland.
The periodicity of the Arctic Oscillation may not be regular – we have little direct data, but I would have thought that there would be somewhere some spectral analysis of the Greenland GISP cores over the Holocene period. The warm periods of MWP and Roman, and at 3000BP, 5000BP (not as pronounced) and ca 8000BP show more of a Fibonacci series than would be sensible to average (8,5,3,2,1) with gradually falling peaks – all the previous Greenland peaks are above the current warm period. This pattern is a subset of what you can see in the ice-age patterns around 30-50,000 years BP, where a cycle repeats with 4-5 peaks per 10,000 years and again with a pattern of the peaks starting out broad and getting narrower in a quasi Fibonacci pattern. An averaging of 2000 years per cycle would obscure the pattern.
If you mail me: peter.taylor(at)ethos-uk.com I can send you the relevant graphics from my book and some more that are more recent.
@Will Crump,
If the following seems rushed it is because it is – please overlook any apparent snippyness.
Unanswered question – I now can’t find but seem to rememeber it was about cycle causeation. Plenty of possible correlations in several threads here culminating with Joe D’Aleo’s tonight, but few real answers. And don’t say I’m just hand waving – the answer is we don’t know yet, but it is intriguing to find the cycle pattern very clear in many parts of the world – http://diggingintheclay.wordpress.com/2010/09/01/in-search-of-cooling-trends/
Will Crump says:
October 31, 2010 at 8:13 am (Edit)
“The very information you provide casts doubt on the stability of the 60 year cycle since the period of the LIA and MWP were not 60 year cycles.”
How so? The LIA & MWP are clearly not 60 year cycles, as mentioned in the review. The spectal analyses in the book are interesting.
“….other information which suggests the cycle is not stable.” To what are you refering?
“You do not appear to be applying the same level of skeptical challenge to the Russian conclusions as you have to other data that conflicts with your bias.” Actually my bias is to find data that offers an alternative view for consideration, and this was not intended as a ‘critical review’, merely reporting what was concluded in the book, enabling critique by others. After all that’s what happens here!
“The 1940 to 1970 period of cooling appears to be the subject of multiple explanations, and given the complexity of climate,…” I agree, and my mention of sulphate was only in response to your mention of it and citing the Thompson paper.
“…show me the forces that will cause the rebound and why these forces are going to be able to override the increase in radiative forcing by CO2 and warming due to loss of albedo due to diminished ice cover.”
How much effect – realistically – will there be from diminished ice cover? Why don’t you give me some numbers to work with – what area of ocean are we talking about and how long each year will it be ice free? Considering the angle of the sun during the months the ocean will be ice free perhaps you can find estimates of the heat adsorption (numbers please) expected as a result? Then while you are at it how much additional heat will be lost from the Arctic to space during these conditions? That is important because however much heat is added to the region a large percentage will be lost.
“If you are going to rely on diminished heat inflow from ocean currents, then explain why this will occur as TSI increases from its current low point. ”
Let’s turn that around – what is the variation in TSI between ‘low point’ and typical solar max?
“…may be a net positive forcing as el nino patterns are shifting and becoming more intense.” Now it is you that is making assumptions. What evidence do you have that any apparent intensity increases are other than just normal variation and that intensification will continue?
“Perhaps you can identify some long term change in the Atlantic ocean currents, which appear to provide most of the heat inflow from ocean currents to the arctic, due to a shift in thermohaline circulation.”
The thermohaline circulation is not something I have looked at – at all, but there are certainly large long term changes in the Atlantic Ocean. It is intriguing that the cooling and a sudden increase in storminess in the Atlantic at the end of the Medieval Warm Period shows up in the GISP2 ice core data.
http://hol.sagepub.com/content/17/4/427.abstract
Perhaps we might be at risk of such a major change again, or can you say with certainty that high CO2 this time will protect us?
This climate game is just a glass half empty/half full thing – you see it one way, I see it the other. If only it were that trivial eh?